ABSTRACT
In Criticism and Social Change, Frank Lentricchia advances a conception of criticism’s political vocation which takes its bearings from Foucault’s and Gramsci’s writings on the nature and function of intellectuals. Adopting, initially, a Foucaultian tack, he argues that questions of critical politics can be intelligibly debated only on the condition that they are related to the specific positions and functions of literary intellectuals in advanced capitalist societies. The key question, he contends, is whether the literary intellectual can ‘do radical work as a literary intellectual’.1 In posing the question this way, Lentricchia seeks to distance our ways of thinking about criticism from the influence of earlier conceptions of intellectuals, particularly those summarised in the Gramscian polarity of traditional versus organic intellectuals.2 The political potential of criticism, he thus argues, will remain concretely unachievable so long as the literary intellectual is conceived as a ‘bearer of the universal, the political conscience of us all’ or, contrariwise, as one whose practice must be ‘overtly, daily aligned with and empirically involved in the working class’.3
