Literary Criticism as Political Practice: Responsibility, Engagement, Solidarity

Whether literary studies should align itself with politics -be they postcolonial, queer, ecological, or anti-racist -has become one of the central tensions within the humanities.In an era marked by resurgent nationalism, authoritarian populism, historical revisionism, and attacks on academic freedom, the realms of academia and culture have become increasingly contested arenas of ideological struggle.Appeals to scholarly neutrality in this context often reinforce complicity, preserving dominant power structures under the guise of objectivity.To move beyond the false dichotomy of the political and the apolitical, we must acknowledge the historical and political entanglements of both literature and literary studies.The premise here is this: literature is always engaged, whether or not it declares itself political, and criticism is always engaged, whether or not it admits its political commitments.Neither literature nor criticism emerge ex nihilo.Both arise from and participate in specific historical conditions, social hierarchies, and ideological conflicts.Every work encodes assumptions about class, race, gender, power, and cultural value.This view aligns with Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Sartrean littérature engagée.In »Commitment«, Adorno rejects the idea that writers should explicitly declare political allegiance, warning that such instrumentalization risks reducing literature to propaganda.Yet he does not advocate aesthetic withdrawal: the autonomy of form is, for Adorno, politically charged insofar as it resists reified language and disrupts dominant ideology through critical distance.This insight can be extended to literary criticism, which likewise resists ideological closure when it attends to textual complexity rather than flattening literature into a message.Walter Benjamin similarly rejects the notion of a neutral aesthetic sphere.In »The Author as Producer«, he insists that literature must be understood not only in terms of content but also in relation to modes of production, transmission, and cultural authority.His shift from interpretation to production anticipates critiques of criticism itself: literary studies, too, is shaped by its historical and institutional conditions and cannot escape their political implications.