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From 1985: Why some people think it is anti-democratic and elitist to believe that some views of literary texts are more worthwhile than others, and why having opinions about literature is different from having prejudices about it.

This conversation among the editors of ARIEL and Timothy Clark addresses his 2012 essay, "Derangements of Scale," published in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change. In his essay, Clark suggests that scale effects play an important role in contemporary global politics and climate change, and he proposes a new, larger scale of literary study commensurate with an awareness of these issues. The editors discuss the implications of Clark's essay for postcolonial studies, the merits of his proposed method of literary interpretation, and the ramifications of his discussion of human agency. Clark takes up all these issues in his response to the editors' conversation.

The nature of criticism as a social practice & its place within a given national intellectual culture are examined through a consideration of English criticism in the cultures of England & Australia. English began to emerge as a scholarly subject in GB in the eighteenth century, but was not fully established until WWI; as developed by F. R. Leavis, it filled the place taken in other European countries by classical sociology &/or Marxism, providing a vehicle of moralistic revolt against established culture. Since WWII, it has declined into an ineffective aestheticism. In Australia, a Melbourne tradition strongly influenced by Leavisism has contrasted with a Sydney tradition of detachment from society. John Docker offers an argument for an Australian synthesis of new criticism & Leavisism, based on rejection of the imitative & intentional fallacies; but these very rejections are alien to Leavis's own ideas, which are closer to those of Australian radical nationalists. In Australia, the site of totalizing discourse is not sociology or Marxism, nor, as in England, literary criticism, but history. W. H. Stoddard

Reprinted in part from various periodicals. ; --Nietzsche.--W. H. Hudson's "Nature books."--Tchehov and his art.-- Ibsen and the English.--Mr. Joseph Conrad.--Mr. C. M. Doughty.-- Ostrovsky's "The storm."--Mr. D. H. Lawrence and the moralists.--Richard Jefferies' "Amaryllis at the fair."--Henry Lawson and the democracy.--Sarah Orne Jewett's tales.--Stephen Crane and his work.--Robert Frost's "North of Boston."--Some remarks on English and American fiction.--American criticism and fiction.--Critical notes on American poets.--Two american novelists.--The contemporary critic. ; Mode of access: Internet.

The article presents the aesthetic and ideological concept of liberal criticism, which was expressed by a leading Galician critic, literary scholar, journalist and cultural figure of the interwar period Mykhailo Rudnytsky. His main scientific works were interpreted as a kind of postulate of "worldlessness" and "liberal criticism" focused on Western European intellectual models. Much of Rudnytsky's publications were written in the ideological vein of a resonant discussion, provoked by the critic and formulated by him under the slogan "Should a writer have a worldview?". In this discussion, M. Rudnytsky argued that it is not important for a writer to have a worldview. The main thing is the aesthetic criterion, which should also be decisive in the literary-critical evaluation of the writer's work. This thesis was quite ambiguous and controversial, as it sharply contradicted the general tendencies of the Galician society of that time. So the discussion provoked a polemical wave. The literary liberalism focused on issues of pure art, the search of Beauty, a kind of aesthetic ideal, non-involvement in politics, the predominance of form and style over content and ideas – founded in the Galician cultural environment of the interwar period more resistance than support. In anticipation of war, amid economic and political instability, in conditions of statelessness, the rejection of any ideology in Ukrainian society was interpreted as an ethical danger, ideological and political nihilism. Article focused also on the scientific and aesthetic problems of Rudnytsky's literary-critical scientific creativity, the specific eclectic stylistics of his works, the influence of the aesthetics and ideology of the Moloda Muza (Young Muse) group and modernism of 19 century on his philosophy and literary theory, the common and different in scientific theories of Mykhailo Rudnytsky and the Polish critic and literary theorist Ostap Ortwin, the cultural europocentrism of literary-critical assessments of Mykhailo Rudnytsky, reception of his ...