James Seaton (professor)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Jean Genet, for example, was a culture hero for both Sontag and Jean-Paul Sartre, even though, or because, he gloried in "crime, sexual and social degradation, above all murder" ("Sartre's Saint Genet") [...] If Sontag could admire Jean Genet, Matthew Arnold had held up François Villon, that "voice from the slums of Paris," with his "life of riot and crime," [The Study of Poetry] over Geoffrey Chaucer. The real difference between the older humanism and Sontag's new ..."--Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism (1996) by James Seaton |
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James Everett Seaton (1944 – 2017) was an American writer, professor and literary critic. He argued for the continued relevance and importance of the tradition of literary humanism championed by Matthew Arnold and later, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer Moore. At the same time he opposed many of the dominant trends in Academia regarding literary criticism and the teaching of literature, such as the Cultural Studies model instituted by Stuart Hall and the general emphasis away from the study of literary works themselves in favor of a focus on critical theory.
Literary criticism
Among Seaton's central contentions were that literary criticism and instruction should prioritize literature over theory, a position he had opportunity to express during C-Span's Teaching Literature conference marking the 10th anniversary of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.
In his 2014 book, Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative, he presented the notion that the history of literary criticism could be broadly conceived of as a conversation between three distinct but at times overlapping traditions, the Platonic tradition which judged literature by the extent to which it conveyed the proper political messages, the Neoplatonic which romanticized literature as a gateway to transcendent knowledge and the Humanistic tradition, which valued literature for its potential to offer insight into the human experience.
