Lidia Vianu interviews Robert Hampson

'RH: I think there are two separate issues here. In the first place, there is the issue of criticism using various kinds of theoretical language. I am entirely sympathetic to this development in criticism over the last thirty/forty years. I have grown up with this, and I am old enough to remember the former criticism with its unexamined assumptions and unarticulated values. My critical work on Conrad has been influenced by ideas from psychology, feminism, postcolonialism, cultural geography – and these have formed the bases for particular projects. At the same time, I am very concerned that critical work returns to the text and close reading of the text. What I am critical of is where the text is merely fed mechanically through a theoretical model – or where pretences are being made to a reading which hasn’t been undertaken (so that references are made to Hegel and Heidegger, for example, without any effort to engage with the work) – or where the critical work moves from one theorist to another without any sense of possible conflicts between theoretical paradigms. Otherwise, theoretical approaches merely add to (and enrich) models of reading.'

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Lidia Vianu interviews Robert Hampson. Worth getting rid of the pop-ups for.