Recent Directions in Critical Theory

Recent Directions in Critical Theory David William Foster Arizona State University If Critical Theory Since 1965 had been published by Norton, it would probably have been called The Norton Anthology ofContemporary Critical Theory, for there is no question that writing about the study of literature has become virtually a recognizable genre of text production. Having freed itself from the idea that criticism enjoys a parasitic relationship to primary literary texts, such writing enjoys the prerogatives vying for equal importance with conventionally identified literary genres, of viewing itself as making the recognition of literature possible by defining the parameters of the literary phenomenon , and of sustaining a tension between literary text production and other forms of cultural production that legitimates the ideological role of both literature and criticism in societies. Furthermore, such critical theorizing revises (or deconstructs, to use a trendier term) the institutionalized study of literature in the modern period both by questioning the separation of literature from other forms of cultural text production (and by challenging the supremacy of literature and, within literature , the supremacy of poetry as the pinnacle of verbal culture) and by suggesting that the study of literature might be something other than the close reading of a hallowed canon of prestige texts. The destabilizing controversies over the incorporation of so-called marginal writing into the curriculum, the "discovery" of women writers and ethnic traditions, the coverage of formerly (but all too often still) taboo subjects like homosexuality, and the conjugation of high literature and popular culture have been made possible in large measure by the rise of critical theory since, approximately, the 1965 which serves as Adams and Searle's terminus ab quo. Concomitantly, such controversies have served to make more theory necessary to account for the structural dislocations produced by attention to the aforementioned topics. I understand that English departments in the U.S. are now faced with the challenge to recast their programs so they are less text-centered and more based on general critical and theoretical topics that will permit a more wideranging study of cultural text production than provided by the century-bycentury , genre-by-genre coverage of a secure literary canon. Some programs are notorious for already having moved in this direction, Yale being the most visible. From the point of view of a Third-World scholar (or even a European one), this shift is noticeably tardy, since the first impact of the aforementioned forms of theory in the U.S. was felt in non-English language departments as a consequence of foreign scholars who "invaded" academe in the 1960s. This was especially true in the case of Spanish programs, where newly arrived Latin American scholars came equipped with an extensive reading of French and German theorists who had not yet been translated into English and a commitment to programs of study that would front theory , not at the expense of the reading list, but to provide the analysis of the texts with the greater resonance of ideological meaning they felt would be possible when they were interfaced with a knowledge of theory, both specifically literary and generally cultural. The Adams and Searle collection is especially useful, like a Norton anthology , for providing an overwhelmingly rich display of critical theory in the last 105 106Rocky Mountain Review twenty years. Moreover, where foreign language departments have tended to emphasize non-English continental sources, the compilers have melded important American and British sources with the standard French, German, and Russian texts. Fifty-four theorists are represented, and the range of coverage is impressively wide, covering both the pondérations about the nature of literature in its many forms and broader ideological inquiries about the nature of culture and literature as a highly problematical category of culture. The result is a collection of studies, independent essays as well as selections from longer works, that will satisfy more than enough the most ambitious demands for a graduate course on literary theory. Originally published in 1978, Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century provided an extended analysis of the four categories of theoretical thinking about literature and culture identified by their subtitle. Where Adams and Searle reproduce major documents by American and European theorists, Fokkema...