SOURCE: “Matthew Arnold and the Subject of Modernity,” in Critical Survey, Vol. 4, No. 3, 1992, pp. 226-32.

In the following essay, Pinkney emphasizes the continuities between Arnold's account of the detached subject of literature's emergence and more recent elaborations on the death of the subject.

One thing which traditionalist and radical literary critics tend to agree on, however bitterly they fight over everything else, is the idea that a decisive transformation or what the French Marxist Louis Althusser might have termed a coupure épistémologique has taken place in English studies over the last twenty or so years. Both sides, naturally, have a vested interest in the notion of such a ‘break’: it suits the traditionalists to draw a sharp distinction between the wholesome and commonsensical discipline English once used to be and the florid, jargon-ridden elitism it has collapsed into, and it suits the radicals to dismiss everything prior...