Abstract:In Englishness and National Culture (1999), Anthony East hope sought to characterise the schisms and antagonisms that define the intellectual field in post-war Britain. Reviving some of the key co-ord...In Englishness and National Culture (1999), Anthony East hope sought to characterise the schisms and antagonisms that define the intellectual field in post-war Britain. Reviving some of the key co-ordinates of Perry Anderson's classic, and still-compelling, 'Components of the National Culture', while maintaining a critical commentary on Anderson and the New Left, Easthope reported on the various dimensions of 'a set of attitudes and vague assumptions, a manner and an idiom made up of habitual phrases and tropes, an informal empiricist discourse working at a deeper level than an explicit ideology' to support the cultural and political establishment.1 For Easthope, the distance between the academy and the dominant metropolitan culture was almost unmanageable. The divisions between literary journalism (with its adherence to bluff common-sense, transparency, and subjectivity) and the more theoretically reflexive forms of literary criticism and history had become so extreme that all that could now be achieved was to trouble literary journalism at the edges, to interfere with tradition, making traditional assumptions visible as such. Easthope did not take art history into his purview, and Anderson had only rather briefly considered the discipline, counting the psychologism of E. H. Gombrich as among the characteristic products of those influential, displaced Euro pean intellectuals whose approaches were most amenable to Britain's conservative academic establishment. Yet in the last years the schisms within art history that in some important respects resemble, and coincide with, these more widely-spread antagonisms have become the subject of serious inquiry and a source of anxiety for a wide variety of academics, critics, and curators. In Figured in Marble, Malcolm Baker proposes that his text should be read in connection with precisely this phenomenon. In the opening lines of his preface, he positions his text on an internal frontier within the discipline:Read More
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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