Ramkrishna
Bhattacharya
Not
a doctrine but a method
Georg
Lukács (1885-1971), philosopher and aesthetician, was one of the
original philosophers of the twentieth century. A lifelong Marxist,
he always believed that Marxism was not a doctrine but a method. In
his seminal essay, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ he insisted on
this point as Engels had done in his celebrated letter to Werner
Sombart (March
11, 1895):
‘This is
a very interesting point, about which Marx himself does not say much.
But his way of viewing things is not a doctrine but a method. It does
not provide ready-made dogmas, but criteria for further research and
the method for this research.’
Lukács
too echoed the same view:
Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment…. [O]rthodoxy refers exclusively to method (1971 p.1. Italics in the original).
In
this and other respects Lukács was always original both in his
approach and in his conclusions. He,
however, acknowledged his debt to Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), a fellow
German philosopher, who first convinced him ‘through his example
that it was possible to philosophize in the traditional manner’
(1983 p.38). Up until 1914 Lukács, in his own words, ‘had been
wasting [his] time with the Neo-Kantianism of the period.’ But in
Bloch he ‘encountered the phenomenon of a man who could do
philosophy as if the whole world of modern philosophy did not exist
and who showed that it was possible to do philosophy like Aristotle
and Hegel’. Lukács always regarded Bloch ‘as a wholly admirable
person and of great integrity,’ even after Bloch left the then
German Democratic Republic in 1961 (1983 pp.126-27; see also Lukács
1974
p.
67).
 |
| Georg Lukács |
It
is indeed somewhat overwhelming: ‘doing philosophy’ without
referring to contemporary philosophers and not
quoting
from their works whether in approval or in refutation. It takes
tremendous courage and sky-high self-confidence to write a series of
articles on Goethe’s Faust
with only a copy of the play and a handful of secondary works, all
belonging to the eighteenth century, on the table. That is precisely
what Lukács did in his Goethe studies that began in the 1930s and
were completed in the 1940s. All of them were in the form of essays
with not a single footnote or endnote, ruthlessly driving one point,
namely, despite occasional backslidings Goethe stood on the side of
reason against the irrationalist German romantics.
Lukács’s
debt to Bloch
This
is the hallmark of Lukács as a philosopher and a literary critic. He
knew he was an original thinker and would not let his readers forget
it. It is therefore no wonder that George Lichthein finds Lukács’s
The
Specific Nature of Aesthetics
(Die
Eigenart des Aesthetischen
)
’[w]holly within the central European tradition’. He complains:
Lukács rarely cites non-German writers, even when they happen to be Marxists or Hegelians. On the evidence of his magnum opus one might be pardoned for supposing that he had never heard of R. G. Collingwood. A few passing references to Christopher Caudwell exhausts the subject of Marxist aesthetics in the English-speaking world. Even within his own culture area he is curiously selective, since he ignored all members of the Frankfurt School, including Theodore Adorno; Lukács does not even refer to Arnold Hauser and Hans Mayer, etc. (1976 pp.116-17).
In
the light of Lukács’s declaration of his debt to Bloch, there is
nothing inexplicable or astonishing in this. Lukács was ‘doing’
aesthetic as an extension of his ‘doing philosophy’. He had no
need to refer to current works on philosophy or aesthetics. Whatever
little he required of anthropology he gathered from V. Gordon Childe
(1892-1957), the author of that significantly entitled work, Man
Makes Himself.
In
an interview with the New
Left Review
(published in July-August 1971) Lukács candidly said: ‘When all is
said and done, there are only three great thinkers in the West,
incomparable with all others: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx’ (1983 p.
181). He admitted that to that day (1971) he had not lost his
admiration for Hegel, and ‘I think that the work Marx began – the
materialization of Hegel’s philosophy – must be pursued even
beyond Marx. I have tried to do this in some passages of my
forthcoming Ontology’ [the book on ontology came out in 1971].
(1983 pp.181-82).
Lukács’s
contribution to Marxism lies in his formulation of an aesthetics
fully drawn from Marx and Engels’s stray remarks and comments.
Unlike Franz Mehring (1846-1919) and Georgii Plekhanov (1856-1918),
Lukács and his Russian friend, Mikhail Lifschitz (1905-1983) felt
that there is a specific Marxist aesthetics as opposed to this or
that aesthetics which had to be harnessed to complete the Marxist
system. They also came out against the approach to turn Marxism into
just one socio-economic theory among others.1
Lukács’s
debt to Stalin
Interestingly
enough, the idea of an independent Marxist aesthetics owing to none
excepting Marx and Engels was not a brainwave of Lukács. It was the
natural outcome of a debate that was going on in the Soviet Union in
1930. A. Deborin (pseudonym of Joffe Abram Noisweebich, 1881-1962), a
Russian Marxist philosopher was trying to establish the orthodoxy of
Plekhanov. No less a person than Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), the then
head of the Soviet Union, came out in protest against this. Stalin,
like his mentor V. I. Lenin (1870-1924), believed Marxism to be an
integral world outlook, not a hidebound petrified doctrine (Lenin
1967a p. 41). Stalin’s criticism of Plekhanov gave Lukács the idea
of making a similar critique of Mehring.
Lukács
acknowledges his debt to Stalin in this respect. He declares: ‘[I]t
is a sheer prejudice to imagine that everything Stalin did was wrong
and anti-Marxist’ (1983 p. 86). Again he said, ’I have never
doubted for a moment that Stalinism involved the destruction of
reason. But I would not think it right to criticize Stalin, let us
say, because we had discovered some parallel or other to Nietzsche’
(1983 p. 104).
While
not denying that a number of the later features of Stalinism
manifested themselves in the Stalin-Deborin debate, Lukács
unhesitatingly admits that Stalin’s defence of an extremely
important point of view (namely, Marxism as a totalizing worldview)
played a very positive role in his own development (1983, p. 86).2
The entire subsequent development of both Lukács and Lifschitz was
set in train by their works on an independent Marxist aesthetics. The
notion, that aesthetics forms an organic part of Marxism, is to be
found in the two essays Lukács wrote on Marx’s and Engels’s
letters to Ferdinand Lassalle, the author of a play called Franz
von Sickingen.
The essays appeared in Der
Rote Aufbau
(1932) and Internationale
Literatur (1933).
Lukács
also speaks of Elena Feliksovna Usevich (1893-1968), a Polish
literary critic, who attacked the orthodox line on naturalism, but
never suffered any serious consequence.3
Usevich and some others denied that ideology could be a criterion for
the aesthetic achievement of a work of art. On the other hand, they
argued that great literary works could emerge on the basis of a very
bad ideology as was the case with Balzac’s royalism. This also
implied that a good ideology can coincide with very poor works of
literature.4
This
is a radical departure from the mechanistic concept that great
literary works could be produced only on the basis of a good
ideology, and conversely, bad ideology would invariably give rise to
very poor works of literature. (1983 p.100)
On
the basis of this novel outlook (namely, ideology cannotbe a yardstick for aesthetic achievement) Usevich went on attacking
the political poetry of the day with perfect impunity. Neither was
she tried or imprisoned nor was she ‘purged’ (1983 p.100).
Lukács
himself was not much involved in all this since he did not know
Russian. Nor was he ever taken to task for expressing his views on
Hegel in the second half of the 1930s, at a time when Andrei
Alexandrovich Zhdanov (1896-1948)
had proclaimed Hegel to be the ideologist of feudal reaction to the
French Revolution. At a later stage Zhdanov together with Stalin
depicted the entire history of philosophy as a long running conflict
between materialism and idealism. This is how Lukács represents the
new phase of philosophical studies in the Soviet Union.
This
representation, however, cannot be wholly true. Lukács was perhaps
forgetting that long before Zhdanov and Stalin, Engels had spoken of
the split of all philosophers ‘into two great camps, idealism and
materialism’ (Ludwig
Feurbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
(1888) in: Selsam and Martel 1963 p.48).
As
against this opposition, materialism vs idealism, Lukács focusses on
a different polarity in his The
Destruction of Reason (German
edition 1954, English edition 1974). He claimed that the struggle was
between rational and irrationalist philosophy. Lukács admitted that
the irrationalists were all idealists, but materialists were not
their only opponents. There were idealists among the rationalist
opponents too. This is indeed totally incompatible with the
Zhdanovian theory, but Lukács was not blacklisted for his rather
unconventional view. On the contrary, his ‘left’ critics accused
him for underplaying the polarity of materialism and idealism. But,
let it be noted that Lukács did not have to face any inquisition,
either in Moscow or in Budapest, for holding such an unfashionable
view. In fact Lukács had never been expelled from the Hungarian
Communist Party, although he was definitely under a cloud until well
into the 1960s. What appeared in the Hungarian encyclopedia in 1962
regarding Lukács’s alleged expulsion from the Party was vehemently
denied by Lukács himself (1983 p. 134).
Passion
for objectivity
Lukács’s
approach to literary judgment is marked by objectivity.
He did not care for the author and his/her intentions, but
concentrated on what had been written. Performance rather than
anything else was his sole concern. George Steiner, not an altogether
unsympathetic critic of Lukács, has spoken of Lukács’s pact with
the Devil, that is, ‘historical necessity’:
The daemon promised him the secret of objective truth. He gave him the power to confer blessing or pronounce anathema in the name of revolution and the ‘laws of history’. But since Lukács’s return from exile [August 1, 1945], the Devil has been lurking about asking for his fee. In October 1956 he knocked loudly at the door (1987 p. 65).5
It
is true that Lukács had agreed to make all sorts of compromise with
the powers that be; he did many things that made his friends and
admirers uncomfortable. For example, he did not speak out against the
Moscow Trial (1936-38). The only reason of his silence, he said, was
to remain inside the Party and be a soldier in the fight against
fascism. It is similar to Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles: a
modern allegory of selling one’s soul in exchange of attaining
objectivity.Objectivity
was the key word in Lukács’s life and thought. Istvan Eörsi
(1931-2005) has conjectured how Lukács might have reacted if he
(Eörsi) would decide to discuss with him the contents of his
(Eörsi’s) essay entitled ‘Georgy Lukács, Fanatic of Reality’:
If I were able to
discuss with him this proposed essay of mine, he would most certainly
direct my attention to its objective nature. “For,” he would say,
“it is not altered in the least by the fact that I have died.” I
would venture to object that his death would be certain to have an
emotional effect on the author and, not unlikely, on the readers of
this article in their attitude to the subject. Because the latter
would appear, by the fact of death, unexpectedly final and closed and
we would not have been prepared for it. “All this is very likely,”
he would reply, “but what we are prepared for is one thing and what
the subject is quite another. The subject is not altered by the state
and character of our preparedness” (The
New Hungarian Quarterly
1971 p. 26; Psyche
and Society,
May 2013, pp. 7-8).
Here
is an example of Lukács’s objectivity in relation to himself. It
was widely known that Thomas Mann (1875-1955) had modelled the
character of Naphta in his novel, The
Magic Mountain,
on young Lukács. Naphta is a Jesuit, highly respected by the members
of his own order but alienated from his priestly community. Generally
speaking, he is not a pleasing character. Yet Lukács did not mind it
a bit that he had been portrayed in an unfavourable light. Eörsi
observes:
[I]t was none other than Lukács who drew attention to the proto-fascist features of Naphta’s character. He was of course aware who Thomas Mann’s model was but he considered it the writer’s private business where he took his models from. He was persuaded that as a literary critic he had only to do with the objective nature of the work as it had been realized readily and with their relationship it bore to reality, and he thought that he could well leave autobiographical matters, not bearing directly on the essential issues, to the painstaking care of philologists (The New Hungarian Quarterly (NHQ ) 1971 p. 32; Psyche and Society (PAS), May 2013, p. 12).
One
of Lukács’s favourite quotes was from Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship
where Philine says, ‘And if I do love you, what concern is that of
yours?’
Lukács
claimed that this was his life long attitude to ‘important men’
(1983 p.40). He also considered this to be the critic’s ideal
standpoint with regard to artists and to people in general (NHQ
1971 p. 32; PAS
p.11).
He remained unaffected by slanders that dogged him throughout his
life. After hearing a particularly unsavoury slander he reflected a
little and told Eörsi, ‘Look, I have always said that as long as
I’m not there I don’t mind if they hang me’ (NHQ
1971 p. 31; PAS
2013
p.11).
Intention
versus Performance
Looking
at the performance
rather than the intention
of the author is the hallmark of Lukács both as philosopher and
literary critic. Lukács’s insistence on performance rather than
intention has a history of its own. While reviewing Margaret
Harkness’s novel, City
Girl,
in a letter addressed to the author (April 1888), Engels applied the
term ‘realism’ in a very special sense: ‘The realism I allude
to may crop out even in spite of the author’s opinion’
(Marx-Engels 1976 p. 91). He cited Balzac as a case in point. Balzac
was politically a Legitimist; his works were all in defence of the
aristocratic classes. Yet his novels represent the republican heroes
in the most favourable light:
That
Balzac was thus compelled to go against his own class sympathies and
political prejudices, that he saw
the real men of the future where for the time being, they alone were
to be found – that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of
Realism, and one of the greatest features in old Balzac (Marx-Engels
1976 p. 92).
Now
we know that this evaluation of Balzac was not originally Engels’s.
As early as 1870 Emile Zola (1840-1902) had formulated it in this
very way. Similarly, unbeknown to both Zola and Engels, Nikolay
Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov (1836-1861),
a Russian critic, had also illustrated this position (namely,
opposition between intention and performance) by referring to the
story of Balak and Ballam in the Old Testament. Balak wished Ballam
to curse Israel, ‘but in the solemn moment of elation a blessing
instead of a curse involuntarily rose to his lips.’ (Lukács 1972
p. 114).6
Lukács
mentions Dobrolyubov but not Zola.7
Going beyond Engels Lukács formulated that discrepancy between
intention and performance, between Balzac the political thinker and
Balzac the author of Human
Comedy
constitutes Balzac’s historical greatness (Lukács 1972 p. 21).
Lukács never tires of reiterating this, always in relation to
Balzac, and never ceases to praise Engels for his ‘methodological
clarity’ which, in his opinion the great Russian critics lacked,
although they ‘were no less distinctly aware of this dialectic’
(1972 pp. 91, 114). One may suspect that Lukács was trying to
separate the political views held by the author and her/his
creativity by upholding Engels’s praise of Balzac as a realist
author. Zola, on the other hand, wished to appropriate Balzac in the
progressive camp. So he declared: ‘Balzac is ours: Balzac, the
royalist and Catholic, worked for the Republic for the free societies
and religions of the future’ (Qtd. Wellek, 4:17-18).8
What
is ‘Party literature’?
N.
Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, once provided a helping hand to Lukács.
In a letter published posthumously (1960), it was found that in
Krupskaya’s opinion, by ‘Party literature’ Lenin did not mean
literature as fine art or imaginative literature. Apparently then
Lenin meant only those pieces (non-fiction) that appeared in Party
press . Certainly this interpretation gives an entirely new
complexion to the formulation made in Lenin’s famous 1905 essay,
‘Party Organization and Party Literature’. Two years after the
publication of this letter Lukacs declared he had long held that very
view. ‘The importance of this statement is considerable, for this
essay was the bible of sectarianism in the arts during the
ideological dictatorship of Stalin and Zhdanov It is curious and
interesting, that the publication of Krupskaya’s letter should have
received so little attention’ (1969 pp.7-8).
Although
it is possible to make the most of this highly interesting and
charitable explanation, not everybody has been taken by it. István
Mészáros, otherwise a staunch defender of Lukács, is more than
sceptical in accepting such a view of ‘Party literature’ in
Lenin’s 1905 essay (1972 pp.107-09). Mészáros does not refer to
Lukács’s preface to the English edition of Probleme
des Realismus (Berlin
1955 English translation 1962) but to his essay on Solzhenitsyn
(1969) in which Lukács cryptically refers to ‘Krupskaya’s
letter’ without any further reference (1970 p.77). Yet the escape
route provided by Krupskaya, intentionally or unintentionally, has
been largely ignored by literary critics who claim to be Marxists.
It is rather strange that Krupskaya’s remark on Lenin’s essay has
not been reproduced in Lenin’s On
Literature
and Art,
a collection of extracts of Lenin’s views as found in his writings
or in the memoirs of others. In any case, Krupskaya’s clarification
is rarely, if at all, mentioned in articles and book-length studies
on Lenin and his aesthetic views.
Lukács’s
shortcomings
Since
Lukács would like to be judged in the same way as he used to judge
others, we would like to point out some of Lukács’s shortcomings
at the end. First, he was thoroughly Euro-centric, having an
extremely narrow perspective of ‘the great tradition’ reminiscent
of the canon of F. R. Leavis (1895-1978), the eminent English critic
of the last century. Second, Lukács’s generalizations are often
rather sweeping; he disregards all evidence that go against his
thesis. Third, he could never properly appreciate the contribution of
modernists or even of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) as the founder of a
new kind of theatre.9
Fourth, Lukács was constitutionally incapable of responding to
poetry, whether of the past or of the present. And, last but not
least, his political stand often blinded his vision. in his
ultra-left phase he dismissed Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare
Baire
(Home
and the World) as
a ‘Gandhi novel’ which betrays his utter ignorance of the date of
composition of the original novel (serialized in Sabujpatra
in 1914, published in book form in 1916, when Gandhi was nowhere in
the picture), and the time when the translations into English (1919)
and from English to German (1920) appeared. There is not the least
trace of objectivity in Lukács’s assessment of Tagore as found in
this deplorable review article which does little credit to his
stature as a literary critic.
One
might multiply instances of many such limitations in Lukács’s
works. Nevertheless, his contributions to both Marxist philosophy and
aesthetics are admittedly outstanding.
POSTSCRIPT
I
have consciously avoided repeating Mészáros’s analysis of
Lukács’s philosophical outlook as given in his Lukács’
Concept of Dialectic.
He pinpoints three categories, namely, (a) “Ought” and
Objectivity, (b) Continuity and Discontinuity, and (c) Totality and
Mediation. His explication merits re-reading, not once, but several
times. I have only tried to supplement Mészáros by highlighting the
aesthetic aspects in Lukács’s literary-critical works.
For
an overview of Lukács’s outlook of literature and art, Bela
Kiralfalvi’s The
Aesthetics of György Lukács is
a reliable guide.
Notes:
1
Here and elsewhere I have adapted Lukács’s own words instead of
quoting him verbatim every time. References to the sources are given
in parentheses.
2
For further details regarding the debate see Kolakowski 3: 63-76.
3
Lukács mentions E. Ussiyevitch as ’[t]hat intelligent and
courageous critic of the Thirties’ in his Preface to the English
edition of Probleme des
Realismus (printed as The
Meaning of Contemporary Realism), p.
8. Lukács is said to have been ‘the intellectual leader’ of the
Russian journal, Literaturny
Critique whose inner
circle comprised M. Lifshitz, I. Satz, and E. Usiyevitch (Mészáros
p.139).
4
We shall come back to Balzac later. Let is be noted that Lukács
often drew logical conclusions of this kind from the works of Marx
and Engels and extended the scope of the original
declarations/statements.
5
By ‘October 1956’ Steiner most probably means Lukács’s tenure
as a Minister of Culture in Imre Negy’s Government and the course
of subsequent events that culminated in his deportation to Romania
(4 November 1956). Lukács had previously become a member of the
enlarged Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party
(Mészáros p. 149).
6
The reference is to Numbers 23:8-10. Balak there said to Ballam,
‘What have you done to me? I brought you to curse my enemy, and
you heap blessing for them!’ To this Ballam replied, ‘Am I not
obliged to say what Yahweh puts into my mouth?’ (23:11-12. Qtd.
from The Jersalem Bible
version). This happened not once, not twice, but thrice.
7
Leo Popper (1886-1911) was the first to develop a theory of ‘double
misunderstanding’ at the level of artistic intention and that of
reception. He wrote of this to Lukács on October 7, 1910 (Lukács
1986 p. 126, 128 n1). Leo Popper is known to have influenced young
Lukács (Lukács 1986 p. 295).
8
Cf. ‘The artist usually sets out – or used to – to point a
moral and adorn a tale. The tail, however, points the other way, as
a rule. Two bluntly opposing minds, the artist’s and the tale’s.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a
critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it’ (D. H.
Lawrence 1923/2003 p.14). To this Angela Carter added: ‘[Lawrence]
was right, even if he did not want this to happen to his
tales’ (Carter p.3). For further examples (for instance, the case
of Dickens) see Hawthorn p. 71.
9
In his long essay, ‘Realism in the Balance’ (Das
Wort 1938) directed
against Bloch, Lukács praised a one-act playlet by Brecht. Brecht
viewed it as a sinister compliment: ‘Lukács has welcomed The
Informer as if I were a
sinner returning to the bosom of Salvation Army’ (Bloch and others
p. 58 n18).
Works
Cited
Bloch, Ernst and others. Aesthetics
and Politics. London:
Verso, 1980.
Engels, Frederick. 1895. Engels
to W. Sombart in Breslaun. London, March 11, 1895.
First published: in the Beitrage
zur Geschichte der deutscher Arbeiterbewegung
No. 3, 1961; Source: Marx and Engels, Selected
Works, Volume 3, pp.
504-506.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/letters/95_03_11.htm
Engels, Frederick. 1987. Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,
in Selsam and Martel (q.v.).
Eörsi, István. 1971. György
Lukács, Fanatic of Reality. The
New Hungarian Quarterly.
Vol.12 No. 4 pp.20-34. Reprinted in Psyche
and Society (Kolkata).
Vol. 11 No. 1, May 2013 pp. 7-14.
Hawthorn, Jeremy. Unlocking
the Text. London: Edward
Arnold, 1988 (first pub. 1987).
Jerusalem Bible, The.
London: Darton, Longan & Todd, 1968.
Kiralfalvi, Bela. 1975. The
Aesthetics of György Lukács. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Kolakowski, Leszek. Main
Currents of Marxism: Its Origin, Growth and Dissolution.
Vol. 3. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982 (first
pub. 1978).
Lawrence, D.H. 1923/
2003. Studies
in Classical American Literature (1923),
in:The Cambridge Edition of
the Works of D.H. Lawrence.
Eds. Ezra Greenspen and others. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lenin, V. I. 1967a. Three Sources and
Three Component Parts of Marxism, Selected
Works. Vol. 1. Moscow:
Progress Publishers.
Lenin, V. I. 1967b. On
Literature and Art.
Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lichtheim, Georg. 1976. Lukács.
London: Fontana/Collins.
Lukács, Georg. 1974. Conversations
with Lukács. Ed. Theo
Pinkus. London: The Merlin Press.
Lukács, Georg. 1971. History
and Class Consciousness.
London: The Merlin Press.
Lukács, Georg. [1968]. Goethe
and His Age. London: The
Merlin Press.
Lukács, Georg. 1983. Record
of a Life. London: New
Left Books.
Lukács, Georg. 1986. Selected
Correspondence 1902-20.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Lukács, Georg. [1970]. Solzhenitsyn.
London: The Merlin Press.
Lukács, Georg. Tagore’s
Gandhi Novel. Review of Rabindranath Tagore: The
Home and the World.
Source: George Lukács, Essays
and Reviews, London: The
Merlin Press, 1983; First
Published: in the Berlin
periodical, Die Rote
Fahne, in 1922. Available
in
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels,
Selected Works,
Volume 3, pp. 504-506.
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/letters/95_03_11.htm>
Mészáros, István. 1983/1991.
Lukács’ Concept of
Dialectic. London: The
Merlin Press.
Selsam, Howard and Harry Martel
(eds.). 1987. Reader in
Marxist Philosophy. New
York: International Publishers.
Steiner, George. 1960/1987. Lukács
and the Devil’s Pact, The
Kenyon Review. XXII, No.
1, Winter 1960, pp. 1-18. Reprinted in George
Steiner: A
Reader. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987.
Wellek, René. 1983. A
History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950.
Vol.4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This
piece was presented in the Max Mueller Bhavan Library, Kolkata as a
part of the lecture programme, The German Intellectual Tradition:
From Kant to Habermas Phase II, on April 4, 2015.
Acknowledgements.
Amitava Bhattacharyya, Amlan Dasgupta, Sunish Kumar Deb, Siddhartha
Dutta, Arindam Saha, and Arun Sen. The usual disclaimers apply
Ramkrishna
Bhattacharya taught English at the University
of Calcutta, Kolkata and
was an Emeritus Fellow of University Grants Commission. He is now a Fellow
of PAVLOV Institute, Kolkata.
Email
ID: ramkrishna.bhattacharya@gmail.com)
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