A Habermasian Literary Criticism

Among literary scholars, Jürgen Habermas has never been the most popular Frankfurt School thinker. With his “communicative turn” in the early 1980s—a move that, for him, involved rejecting almost completely the political value of the aesthetic—he alienated what few allies he had left in the literary field. Despite this, “A Habermasian Literary Criticism” argues that Habermas's thinking holds serious value for literary studies today. The essay begins by drawing out an immanent critique of Habermas's arguments against the value of literature. Though Habermas does not see it, his later theory can help clarify literature's role as a means of enabling intersubjective communication. A focus on intersubjectivity allows critics to recognize books as part of an elaborate process by which texts make manifest changes: they shape public opinion, transform civil society, and ultimately exercise an impact on the juridical sphere. A Habermasian literary criticism, then, offers a new way to think about the relation between politics and literature, ranging from the fundamental encounter between readers and books to the way that a book—through its diverse readers and conditions of reading—can alter political practice. Unintentionally, Habermas has provided not only a methodological framework for a sociology of literature, but one grounded in the origins of critical theory.