“TELE-VISIONING” THE COMIC CYCLICITY OF WESTERN CRITICISM

Abstract

The paper evaluates contemporary Western literary academics by viewing the dynamics of some of its most apparently formidable critical paradigms in terms of a cat-and-mouse game. Nevertheless, the critique remains oblique, as the possibility of saving itself from complicity with what it critiques remains only in the margins for now. Although this strategy at times may distract the reader from the principal theme of the essay, which is to bring out the ironic cyclicity of the Western critical paradigms, it has been adopted herein to differentiate it from its deconstructive counterparts in Western criticism. The Western critiques of Western criticism, such as deconstruction, predominantly reflect a hopelessness in the face of the ubiquity of the Western classical categories, and thus stop short of coming up with the possibility of any alternate critical discourse.