Critical Conventions: The Literary Arts and Sciences

John O'Neill's collection of essays analyzes post-Kuhnian critical practice in the literary and social sciences by focusing on issues of cognitive style and disciplinarity. In his examinations of Fredric Jameson's reading of Baudelaire and Joseph Gusfield's rhetorical analysis of social science writing, O'Neill challenges current assumptions about the political functions of literary criticism and the fictionality of the sciences. He rejects Richard Rorty's Kuhnianism as "an unruly license for peddling American liberal ideology", just as he rejects the authoritarian practices of Stanley Fish's interpretive community and Jameson's violations of an ideal critical community. Instead, O'Neill ranges across disciplines in his interrogation of writing as a scholarly and scientific activity, offering cogent "symptomatic" readings of Montaigne, Descartes, Barthes, Vico, Joyce, and Freud that recreate the Renaissance dialectic between desire and the body politic.

The essays also treat various kinds of writing - the science article, the essay, the literary review, the conference commentary - as instances of "writing in kinds, that is to say, as writing that achieves in untaught ways the texture of philosophical, sociological, and literary argument." O'Neill sets forth a defence of the ideal tradition of communication in the arts and sciences that is at odds with radical literary politics now beset by ideological narcissism and authoritarianism among its own establishment critics.