Skeptical Engagements - Softcover

Crews, Frederick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195056604 ISBN 13: 9780195056600

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1988

Eleven years ago, in Out of My System, the influential literary critic, Frederick Crews, disclosed the erosion of his Freudian sympathies. Now, in a carefully reasoned and witty new book, he reveals where that reappraisal has taken him and why he has come to regard himself as an opponent of all "self-validating" doctrines. The essays and pieces in this volume concern what Crews calls "the fear of facing the world, including its works of literature, without an intellectual narcotic ready at hand."
Having witnessed psychoanalysis from the believer's vantage point as well as the skeptic's, Crews offers a uniquely trenchant perspective on Freudian claims. He also presents a searing critique of pretension and folly in the literary academy, from deconstructive "freeplay" to post-structuralist Marxism, applying his skepticism and his cultural concerns to such diverse figures as Joseph Conrad, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Philip Rahv, and Leslie Fiedler.

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About the Author:

About the Author:
Frederick Crews, Professor of English and holder of a Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of several other books, including Out of My System, E.M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism, and The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes.

From Publishers Weekly:

Crews renounced Freudian theory some 11 years ago, and his lacerating attacks on psychoanalysis and its disciples, many of which are reprinted here, have earned this literary critic such epithets as "neo-Freudophobe," "murderous" and "irrational." To Crews, psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience, flawed as a theory, because it exists in an empirical vacuum, and weak as a therapy. One essay provocatively observes that Freud, while devising his grand system in the late 1890s, was beset by anxieties and taboos, having hallucinations, steeped in numerology and experimenting with cocaine. In this collection of essays and reviews, Crews also turns his critical fire on Marxism, a "born-again yet anemic religion" that has found a niche in academia. He tears into such fashionable movements as deconstructionism and structuralism, then brings to bear a skeptical intelligence on Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Philip Roth, Leslie Fiedler, Philip Rahv and Joseph Conrad.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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