Critical Conventions: Interpretations in the Literary Arts and Sciences

This study challenges current assumptions about the political function of literary criticism and the fictionality of the sciences. In these essays John O'Neil analyses post-Kuhnian critical practice by focusing on issues of cognitive style and disciplinarity. Ranging across disciplines in his exploration of writing as a scholarly and scientific activity, he offers cogent "symptomatic" readings of Montaigne, Descartes, Barthes, Vico, Joyce and Freud that recreate the Renaissance dialectic between desire and the body politic. These essays treat various kinds of writing - the science article, the essay, the literary review, the conference commentary - as instances of "writing in kinds, that is to say, writing that achieves in untaught ways the texture of philosophical, sociological and literary argument".

In demonstrating "how the edifice of human sciences is produced in ways that we consider 'good enough' to read, comment on and argue about", O'Neill sets forth a defence of the ideal tradition of communication in the arts and sciences that is at odds with a radical literary politics now viewed by this book as being beset by ideological narcissism and authoritarianism among its own established critics.