Left Politics and the Literary Profession

By providing a meditative overview of the past twenty years in the political study and teaching of literature, Where We're Bound assesses the concrete contributions of the sixties and the kind of changes that needed to come about to institutionalize the activism of this period. Twenty years ago, Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter published their groundbreaking anthology, Politics of Literature. It was the first book, born out of the sixties, to integrate the political insights of the New Left into the practice of literary criticism. Keenly aware of the politics and criticism since the sixties, Davis and Mirabella have produced a successor to the earlier volume. This work includes essays by both Kampf and Lauter, as well as by such well known scholars as Gerald Graff, Richard Ohmann, Catherine R. Stimpson, and writers, including Tillie Olsen.The authors survey various politicized realms of literary study - leftist, feminist, black, chicano, and others. While contributing to the ongoing debate about literary theory, Where We're Bound comes out of a tradition of political activism and also addresses itself to practical politics. It thus provides an important link between the radical politics of the sixties and the intellectual activities of radicals who study literature now, or will study it in the future.