Deliberate Criticism

Contemporary debates on literary criticism often assumes that "humanism" and "postmodernism" are irreconcilable and that their respective practitioners are necessarily political, pedagogical and philosophical enemies. In "Deliberate Criticism", Stephen R. Yarbroough challenges this assumption by laying the groundwork for a mode of humanistic criticism appropriate to the post-modern era. One of the chief obstacles to this task, Yarbrough explains, has been the tendency of avowed humanistic activity. Too often they view humanism as having a fixed ideology and methodology. As a result, it is frequently associated with traditional criticism and values. Because Yarbrough views humanism as an attitude toward theory rather than a theory in itself, he argues that is is possible to achieve a humanistic criticism even within a mode as apparently antihumanist as post-modernism. Central to Yarborough's thesis is the idea that the purpose of humanism and humanistic thinking is to nurture the "human capacity to provide alternatives and to deliberate and choose decisively among alternatives within particular circumstances". As such, deliberation becomes the fundamental act of human thinking.
Yarborough goes on to argue that if we wish to revitalize criticism as a humanistic exercise of freedom and choice, linear, noncontradictory argument can no longer be the paradigm of critical discourse. To illustrate this view, Yarborough examines the work of important and representative intellectuals from Aristotle to Edward Said, showing why they insist on a humanistic criticism characterized by intllectual openness and balance. Yarbrough also reads critics such as Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Hartman, who, while appearing to be "antihumanistic", as really demonstrating, in full complexity, the inescapable necessity of humanistic critical values. Ambitious in its historical and intellectual range, "Deliberate Criticsm" re-establishes the intellectual legitimacy and cultural authority of humanistic criticism in the face of various forms of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism.