James Everett Seaton (1944 – March 30, 2017) was an American writer, professor and literary critic. He argued for the continued relevance and importance of the tradition of literary humanism championed by Matthew Arnold and later, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer Moore. At the same time he opposed many of the dominant trends in Academia regarding literary criticism and the teaching of literature, such as the Cultural Studies model instituted by Stuart Hall and the general emphasis away from the study of literary works themselves in favor of a focus on critical theory.
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Biography
James Seaton was born in Iowa, received B.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana, and earned a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature with a major in Greek and Latin from the University of Iowa. He was a professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, where he taught from 1971 until his passing. Seaton was married to playwright Sandra Seaton.
James Seaton wrote or edited five books. He was a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard, and his essays and reviews have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar (magazine), Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, First Things, Modern Age, The University Bookman, The Review of Metaphysics and The Journal of the History of Ideas and many other academic and non-academic publications.