SOURCE: Bernstein, Carol L. “Subjectivity as Critique and the Critique of Subjectivity in Keats's Hyperion.” In After the Future: Postmodern Times and Places, edited by Gary Shapiro, pp. 41-52. Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Bernstein considers the impact of subjectivity in Hyperion, drawing from theoretical debates about modernism and postmodernism.

One of the problems of postmodernist literary criticism has been that of aligning it with other cultural objects of modernity and of postmodernity itself. Like Twemlow in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, who faces the bottomless abyss of deciding whether he is Veneering's oldest or his newest friend, criticism faces the abyssal decision of where to situate its primary—or its ultimate—affiliations. It would seem to be a contradiction in terms for poststructuralist criticism to defend only the new, although a defense of the old would put its very qualities...