T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism

by Richard M. Shusterman

T.S. Eliot, no less a distinguished as a critic than as a poet, began as a student of philosophy. As a young man he planned to take up philosophy as a career, and his later critical theory was deeply influenced by his philosophical outlook. This book, written by a professional philosopher trained in the analytic tradition, is the first philosophically rigorous and systematic account of Eliot's views and development. Tracing this devolpment against the mainstream twentieth-century philosophy, both Anglo-American and continental, it defends Eliot's critical theory against the dismissive attitude of the poststructuralists and Marxist, illuminating not only the work of Eliot himself but the state of literary theory today.

252 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1988

About the author

Richard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher. Known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics and the emerging field of somaesthetics, currently he is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.