Literary Theory in the United States: A Survey

Reviewed work(s):
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 14, No. 2, On Convention: II (Winter, 1983), pp. 409-451
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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LITERARY THEORY IN THE

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HE following survey was undertaken during 1982. An attempt

was made to obtain representative statements from scholars in

this country, Great Britain, and Europe regarding the teaching and writing of literary theory at the present time. The survey
seemed the most appropriate way to discover how theorists feel about
their own subject and what they and their students think are its
shortcomings and prospects.
The answers given below are presented in alphabetical order. Subsequent issues will contain essays pertinent to the survey.
The three questions of the survey were:
1. What ought to be the aims and functions of literary theory at the
present time?
2. What practical consequences has theory had in your teaching of
literature and in your writing of criticism?
3. What do you consider the shortcomings of theory, if any, in
graduate education?
THE EDITOR

David Bleich, Indiana University:

1. I understand the traditional disciplines of language and literature to be the study of literary texts, genres, history, and meanings; I
think literary theory today ought to be concerned with the purposes,
reasons, presuppositions, and principles associated with the study of
language and literature.
Literary theory should compare received concepts of language and
literature with new concepts, sought concepts, and concepts from
related disciplines such as philosophy, history, and sociolinguistics,
and others, including the sciences. Theorists should promote exchange between orthodox students of language and literature and
other students who ask why these subjects exist and why they are
important; in addition, theorists should aim to disclose choices within
traditional subject categories, so that change, growth, and development become more anticipated elements in any inquiry.
Literary theory should contribute to the changing of social and
professional institutions such as the public lecture, the convention
presentation, the classroom, and the processes of tenure and promotion. Theoretical work ought to show how and why no one class of
scholars, and no one subject (including theory) is self-justifying,
and self-sustaining. Theorists should commit
self-explanatory,

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themselves to disciplining intellectual change, and to the principled reappropriation of ideas which seem not to change. Finally,
literary theory ought to promote active awareness of each person's
membership in several intellectual, cultural, and professional communities at once, to disclose our responsibilities to these communities,
and to teach us to form new communities when needed.
2. The emergence of literary theory as a working curricular genre
in my university has had several important consequences in which I
have been involved. (a) An interdisciplinary formal minor-a program of courses-has been established on both undergraduate and
graduate levels; courses from other literature departments and other
humanities departments are included. (b) Several faculty and
student-faculty groups have begun to meet regularly (monthly, usually) to study new work in literary theory, and to share one another's
works, either published or in progress. (c) Annual theory conferences
have been encouraged and supported by the university to enhance
familiarity in this community with the work of other theorists. (d) The
teaching and the study of writing has begun to include, in addition to
composition theory, theoretical work in language, cognition, and literature.
My work has moved toward experimenting with different classroom formats, different means of studying practical language, literary response, and critical judgments, and my published writing has
begun reporting on these developments. I have tried to create classroom procedures and forms of thought that combine theoretical,
critical, and practical aspects of language and literary inquiry, in
freshman, undergraduate, and graduate courses. I report on these
developments regularly in local forums, study groups, and conferences. Study in theory has suggested certain ideas for these experiments and makes them comprehensible when I report them in public.
3. Theoretical concerns cause problems when they present themselves as self-sufficient and autonomous. Some schools of theory seem
to call on others to "apply" them, and graduate students are often
eager for such tasks; some theories present themselves as "beautiful,"
as Elizabeth Bruss has noted, and graduate students are eager to
admire them. However, either to "apply" or admire theory implies that
it has already been perceived as an essentially separate domain, e.g.,
"let us see if we can now 'use' all the theory we know," which suggests
that social, professional, and practical consequences were not a concern of the theories to begin with. This feature of theory is a danger
because it reinforces the historic stereotype of intellectual effort as
aimless and useless.
Some forms of theory encourage apprentice thinkers to question,

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negate, or "resist" the assertions that some have risked. There is a

"trope of negation" which makes its task to deny or invert affirmative
proposals, regardless of how tentatively they are presented. Such
theories have already decided what it is that cannot be decided. Formulaic negation, while often stimulating and provocative, ultimately
suggests that thinking is better than, and separate from, acting, rather
than that theory and social initiative are mutually responsible to one
another.
Theory ought to show that questioning alone, or "resisting" alone,
or even understanding or textual mastery alone are inadequate; consequences among real social groups (students, professors, deans, or
politicians or entrepreneurs, for that matter) should be anticipated,
sought, and tested by theorists. Ideas which begin and end as theories
reduce the value of theory.
Morton W. Bloomfield, Harvard University:
1. I think it is very important that, after the excitement of New
Criticism (in its theoretical aspects), structuralism and various poststructuralisms (reader response or reception esthetics, social context,
and Derridian deconstruction), we try not to lose our heads on the
next "wave." After all, literary theory has always occupied the minds
of those who are interested in literature (from at least the time of
Aristotle) and is going to continue for a long time to interest readers,
critics, and teachers of literature. It is true that it has received special
attention and has become fashionable in Western Europe and
America in the past twenty-odd years. That wave will subside, but it
will by no means die. It would be helpful if we realize this fact and the
wide-ranging scope of literary theorizing. It would be better for all of
us if we did not leap from one bandwagon to another, but recognized
the multiplicity and complexity of our subject. I do not expect any
suggestion for an eclectic approach to be accepted.
2. The present widespread interest in theory has made me aware
of many aspects of literature which I either did not know or did not
concentrate on. I can't say that is has improved my teaching or writing
of criticism, although I think it has. It makes one ask different and
new questions of the literature one reads or teaches. It enriches our
subject and helps to create and maintain the excitement that makes
literature such a significant and enthralling subject.
3. A certain amount of theorizing will come into graduate classes
no matter what we think. I also think a graduate student in literature
should specifically study a few courses devoted to theory, but I do not
think it should replace the study of literary works and to some extent
literary history as the centers of graduate education. The major

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shortcoming of theory is its tendency to minimize the particular and

to overemphasize the general. Both are necessary. The study of literature must not be buried in philosophy and philosophical reasoning,
although it must not neglect it. A student without some awareness of
literary theory would be seriously handicapped; one who knows only
individual literary works and/or literary history is inadequately prepared to be a good teacher of literature.
Literary theory at present tends to be narrowly focused. No matter
how strongly we subscribe to one school or another, we must allow our
students to experience some of the other theories. The Marxists
should have their day, but they must allow for intrinsic factors in the
understanding of literature. The deconstructionists, who are strongly
imbued with the Romantic spirit, must also allow the classicists to have
their say. Not all literature is Rousseauist, some of it is Shakespearean.
Psychologizing has its limits.
Jim Springer Borck, Louisiana State University:
1. The purpose of any critical methodology ought to be to keep the
language of the tribe "current" and "alive," as well as to display the
variety (variety here meaning the artistic generosity offered by the
text) of the text under examination.
2. The practical consequences of working within a specific critical
methodology have been reminders of rigorous discipline; to be aware
of other methods, and to acknowledge them in my own writings,
creates a fairness of approach. Though I am made very uneasy by
some of the permutations of structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, et al., and regard myself primarily as a historical contextualist, I find de Man, Derrida, and Iser (to cite a few) all illuminating when "reading" a text. My heart, however, still remains
with Wimsatt and R. S. Crane.
3. Shortcomings of theory as now taught: both that it is taught too
little and too much, that graduate students are not exposed to enough
critical theory and its importance, and that they tend to misuse theory
by way of avoiding reading the text. I also think that the impact of
computer technology hasn't been evaluated in terms of the study of
literary texts-not just compilation of bibliographies and concordances-but questions about the effect of having machines "read"
texts, the exciting work with artificial intelligences, and the humanistic
evaluative computer languages such as PL/1.
Leo Braudy, Johns Hopkins University:
1. The English Institute this year was a fascinating gloss on your
first question. There, for the first time in a while, the mode seemed

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integrative rather than confrontational. Whether the subject was Pope

or Marxist theory, there was an openness to other ideas that I enjoyed
very much. (On the other side would be Stanley Fish, who thought it
smacked of "liberal pluralism.") It is just in this area that I think
literary criticism ought to go. Much has been exposed and debated.
Now I think it's time to see what is useful and what isn't. Then, as in so
many other disciplinary subfields, there will be theory that everyone
ought to have at least a nodding acquaintance with (like Chaucer or
Donne), and theory that only the specialist will be aware of or interested in (like Henryson or Hall).
2. In my own teaching, the existence of theory, not necessarily its
specific preachings or perspectives, has pressed me to sharpen ideas
and perspectives that might otherwise be unexamined. But in
graduate education I think it too often supplies a false refuge for the
student looking for defenses rather than expansion. That is one reason why I like the situation at the English Institute so much. For a
long time I have been turned off equally by the more extreme claims
of both the trendy and the troglodyte. Now it seems that a period of
dynamic synthesis is in prospect. Maybe it is liberal pluralism (if that
can be separated from wishy-washy). But I like it anyhow.
Terry Eagleton, Wadham College, Oxford, England:
1. One aim of literary theory today should be to offer students the
conceptual means to connect literary studies to other, arguably more
historically and politically important concerns. Another aim is to offer
them the means to read literary texts in ways unacceptable to the
ruling ideologies. The former aim is perhaps largely confined to
places of higher education; the latter is one which literary theorists
should be trying to develop in cooperation with those who teach literature in schools.
2. One of the main practical consequences of my using theory in
teaching has been to create problems for students reading English
literature within a deeply traditionalist university. Students tend to
experience the gap between the approaches institutionally demanded
of them, and the new methods to which they are introduced, as both
illuminating and frustrating. Some disown the new methods, but
perhaps in the awareness that they are rejecting something of potential value; others hive them off from their bread-and-butter work and
settle for a semischizoid existence; a minority campaign and organize,
as at present in Oxford, to radically overhaul the academic system.
The main effect of my introducing theory into my writing has been
some rather hostile reviews.
3. Literary theory is in danger of becoming quarantined within

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literary studies as an esoteric area of its own, reputedly akin in difficulty to nuclear physics. It provides a stimulating but speculative enclave of ersatz radicalism for teachers and students caught in a period
of relative political deadlock in the advanced capitalist societies. It can
escape such confines only by practical interventions within the academy into what is taught there, how, and why.
John M. Ellis, University of California, Santa Cruz:
1. The aims and function of literary theory should be close to those
of theory in most fields: the investigation and clarification of the most
general questions in the field, i.e., those dealing with the aims of the
field, the nature of its results, the appropriateness of competing methodologies. Because the central questions in theory are mostly well
known already, progress in theory is made by patient, careful analysis of concepts and arguments, accurately formulated distinctions, or
reexamination of familiar lines of argument to see if their logic conceals some fundamental hidden confusion. The character of critical
theory is not (or should not be) dazzling or "exciting" (except in the
sense that any important new theoretical idea or argument is exciting
if it is important); above all, its strength must lie in accuracy and precision of formulation. Only thus can progress be made in the reexamination of the theoretical issues which arise in literary criticism.
2. My own criticism has always been guided by the analysis I have
made of the theoretical issues in criticism. The priorities that I have
argued for in criticism in my The Theoryof LiteraryCriticismhave been
those at work in my Narration in the GermanNovella and two books on
Kleist; the critical procedures of these volumes of criticism have been
the procedures argued for in the theoretical book; the nature of the
interpretations arrived at is, I am certain, very much part of the view
of criticism from which they originate. My teaching of literature is
similarly very much a part of the same complex.
3. The shortcomings of theory in graduate education at present
follow from the view of the value of theory in paragraph 1 above. At
the moment, theory is a matter of fads and fashion, and the emotional
basis of its popularity seems to be more a question of enthusiasms,
fashionableness, feelings of superiority over the common herd, excitement and inspiration, and group celebrations of tribal solidarity
and power. The accepted style of theoretical inquiry is the splendor of
grandiose vagueness, rather than the clarity required for any genuine
theoretical inquiry. All of this is, in fact, a travesty and degeneration
of what theory ought to be. And in this climate far too many are very
poorly informed about the real complexity of theory of language and

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literature that existed before Derrida, for example; graduate students

are taught to see his attack on the metaphysics of presence as a great
breakthrough and innovation, and neither they nor the faculty who
have them read Derrida seem to have any idea how many and how
complex are existing writings which have attacked essentially that idea
in more logically profound ways. In short, theory now in graduate
education is something of a scandal.
Raymond Federman, State University of New York at Buffalo:
1. You ask, what ought to be the aims and functions of literary
theory at the present time? For me, above all, to reassert the value of
literature, to authenticate its presence, to affirm its existence in our
culture as one of the most important of human activities.
At a time when literature (especially in our retrogressive antiintellectual society) seems to have lost its credibility and even its functionality; at a time when anything passes for literature in the supermarkets of books, when cookbooks, comic books, pseudoscientific
manuals, celebrity biographies written by ghost writers, gothic novels,
spy novels, harlequin romances, and so forth, are confused with literature; at a time when, in order to be, literature must be approved
by reviews in the official mercantile press (The New York Times Book
Review, or such depressing publications), then the role of literary
theory (aims and functions, if you prefer) is to make the distinction,
to mark the difference between books and nonbooks. In other words,
literary theory, for me, should not only have an intellectual responsibility to articulate what literature is or is not, where it has been and
where it is going, but should also have a political responsibility to expose and denounce the imposture, the fraud of what pretends to be
literature.
2. You ask, what practical consequences has theory had in your
teaching of literature and in your writing of criticism? I am tempted
to say none, though that would be unfair. As a fiction writer (one
whose work has been labeled experimental) who teaches literature out
of necessity, and occasionally writes criticism, it seems to me that one
cannot separate literature (the text) from theory. I consider my work
(and that of my contemporaries) to contain its own theory. Therefore,
when I teach literary texts, I do not deal only with literariness but also
with the theoretical aspects of the texts. In fact, all works of literature
contain their own theoretical dimensions. Old-fashioned (traditional)
criticism ignored this aspect of literature. New literary theory
perhaps overemphasizes that aspect too much, to the point of only
seeking the theoretical in a literary text. In other words, too often

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literary theory abandons literature. Moreover, and this seems more

serious for me, literary theory does not seem able to deal with contemporary texts (experimental ones especially). Perhaps this is because
these texts being themselves theoretical, articulating within themselves their own theory, in a way exclude the theoretician. I am not
sure I have stated this too clearly, but I do deplore the fact that so little
attention is given to the contemporary text in literary theory.
3. You ask, what do you consider the shortcomings of theory, if
any, in graduate education? Since a graduate program, by necessity, is
limited to a certain number of courses (credits or units) the time
devoted to literary theory is taken away from reading and studying
literature. And when literary theory takes over completely, as is the
case in some graduate programs, then we create strange creatures
with a huge head but no body who speak a rather curious jargon
which they themselves do not always understand. There must be a
way for literary theory and literature to find a happy balance, ajoyful
union in our graduate programs. To be quite blunt, I feel that wherever literary theory takes over the study of literature, it creates a kind
of anxiety in our students.
Stanley Fish, Johns Hopkins University:
1. I don't think literary theory has aims and functions, except that
it is an attempt to give a general account of what we do; it also sets its
own questions and problems, and therefore at any one time one already knows its aims and functions.
2. My teaching of literature has been markedly affected by theory
since I find myself continually reading literary texts as thematizations
of the theoretical position I happen to hold. This is no doubt true of
everyone, but probably more self-consciously so of those who are
themselves theorists.
3. The fact that neither theory nor the history of criticism is taught
as a serious subject in most graduate departments is, I think, a great
and all-encompassing shortcoming.
Alastair Fowler, University of Edinburgh, Scotland:
1. I think that literary theory should now increasingly move away
from issues of structuralism and of deconstruction, to engage again
in questions of description or preliminary construction. And there
should be more attention to questions of the ontology of the work,
less about the ontology of literature. It seems to me striking how the
work of Ingarden, for example, has had so little continuation. Then,
the relation of diachronic and synchronic criticism needs to be further
examined.

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2. I feel that too much of my time has to go in rebutting opinions of

theorists who seem to have relatively little interest in literature. Much
current literary theory seems to me a distraction from the subject
itself. In a sense, current literary theory has had little other bearing on
my own criticism, except for genre theory, which has had a very great
deal.
3. While literary theory is in my view deleterious at the undergraduate stage, a small amount may be beneficial for postgraduate
students-say, half a dozen seminars per year. These might have the
effect of arousing a sense of the complexity of the subject. But in
general the early years are so important in the task of acquiring familiarity with literature and its historical context and of developing a
sense of period, that we cannot afford dissipating them on literary
theory. Specific shortcomings include the following: it lends specious
support to the neglect of diachronic study; it lends support to narcissistic tendencies of criticism, already strong at that age; it provides a
means of avoiding the challenge presented by tradition; and it avoids
the challenges of verification and of possible disproof.
Michel Glowinski, Institute of Literary Research, Warsaw, Poland:
1. I cannot imagine a literary study which would not accept the
dominant position of literary theory. If there were, such an inadequate study would fall victim to its own naivete, would remain true to
an unacceptable, irrelevant, purely referential theory, whereas any
theory dealing with the work of art, its process of development and
expression, is always relevant to our actions. I see the main objectives
of literary theory as threefold: (a) It creates an apparatus that can
explain or describe the literary work, its poetics, its existence in history, and its function. It allows the opening up in literature of those
aspects and events that were up to this time neglected or minimized
(for example, the problematic of the reader and of the principles of
selection). Working with a new vocabulary, literary theory creates the
possibility of new insights into general problems and specific works.
(b) Literary theory integrates findings gleaned from analyses of particulars and demonstrates that literary study need not be a mere disorganized collection of bits of information on various subjects. Literary study is now beginning to have a systematic character which has
significant consequences; namely, it unites concern for particulars
with a larger philosophical context. (c) Literary theory creates an
arena for understanding among scholars and thus performs an important communicative function. Theorists speak in varied languages,
but we know the basis of each language, so that even though we may
not agree when dealing with problems, we can at least understand one
another.

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2. The answer to this question is entailed in the previous answer.

Literary theory is the main subject of my interest, and I refer to it
even when I am involved in studying particulars, for instance, the
of individual works. The main
analysis and interpretation
problems-highly complicated ones-seem to me to be the transition
from theory to interpretation, from poetics to the description of a
concrete work, and from description of a work, which in its very nature is undirected, to hermeneutics.
3. In the last few decades, literary theory has played an important role, but this has brought with it a number of uncertainties. Just
as interpretation has limited its analysis to the particular work, and
thus brought about the minimizing and disregard of general problems, so literary theory can lead, in its overemphasis on generality, to
a disregard of problems that are specific to works of art. This danger
is equally present in teaching and writing; moreover, because of
theory's abstract and schematizing methodology, it creates difficulties
in locating the individuality of a work. The reader of theoretical
works cannot remain unconcerned about this threat. But an awareness of this danger is the method for preventing its occurrence.
Lionel Gossman, Princeton University:
1. I don't see that the question can be answered solely with reference to literary theory. Like many similar intellectual activities, literary theory usually has two aspects. It is a technical investigation of an
object, in this instance the nature of literature-its ontological status,
how it comes to have meaning or create meaning, its relation to other
aspects of culture, and so on-and the nature and practice of criticism,
commentary, and interpretation. But in addition, in a more indirect
way, it is-to a far greater extent than many who practice it would
care to admit-a normative activity, a "political" activity in the widest
sense, conveying values and judgments, establishing legitimacies and
illegitimacies, performing exclusions. In this it is not different, I
think, from other activities in the humanities and social sciences
(philosophy, theology, some kinds of sociology at least): i.e., it is a way
of addressing, indirectly and within a socialized framework of commonly accepted terms, rules, and procedures, fundamental questions
of life that can't easily be addressed directly (one cannot look directly
at the sun or at death, as La Rochefoucauld put it)-identity and
community, tradition and individuality, time and death, and so forth.
There is a theoretical discourse which claims to be untainted by such
concerns and which rests its claim to be theoretical precisely on its
transcendence of ideology. I personally cannot accept this claim. As

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much as I respect the observance of rules and procedures of argument and discourse and recognize the need for them, I reject the
positivist illusion of a value-free discourse. I believe all human discourse is freighted with desire and embedded in history. The best
theoretical discourse recognizes its own "materiality," so to speak (i.e.,
the impossibility of achieving absolute purity) and understands that,
far from constituting a flaw, this inescapable materiality contributes
essentially to the meaning, interest, and importance of theoretical
discourse. I suspect that theory which claims to be above desire and
history almost always functions repressively and terroristically.
2. I have found some theory largely self-contained and of little
relevance to the study of texts. This is not intended as an adverse
criticism. Theory can be interesting and stimulating even if it doesn't
illuminate texts-like esthetics. On the other hand, some theory (from
Lukacs to Lotman) has helped me considerably by indicating new
ways of looking at texts, new features of them, new questions to ask. If
I can speak autobiographically for a moment, my first sense of actively
practicing literary criticism, rather than simply recording impressions
whose origin and status I was uncomfortably unsure of, came to me
after I discovered Lukacs in the German departmental library at the
University of Glasgow in 1947. Until then I had no idea what I was
doing or should be doing. I can't claim to be a very theoretically
informed or rigorous critic, but to the extent that I am a critic at all, it
is through Lukacs, and I owe him an enormous debt. I haven't been
faithful to Lukacs, of course; but I haven't been unfaithful either. If
Lukacs's work can be considered theory, I owe a great deal to theory.
3. Theory does tend to absorb the energies of graduate students.
Many become interested in it for its own sake, as a kind of philosophy
or science, rather than as a means of enriching and deepening their
understanding of texts. I personally do not find this reprehensible or
regrettable. I myself sometimes wonder whether my interest in cultural history is at the service of my readings of texts or whether it is
itself my true object. My chief reservation concerning theory was
stated in my answer to question 1. It is that it may function terroristically and repressively, making student readers reject interesting and
suggestive perceptions and ideas because they can't be formulated
with sufficient rigor or can't be justified and validated in terms of a
comprehensive theory, or even incapacitating them altogether. There
is a whole range of responses to literary texts, and I think it would be a
pity if we permitted ourselves to ask only those questions which a
coherent theory of literature or culture legitimizes. We have to work
in the dark too. Often such work is the most resourceful kind of work

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the critic can do. It needn't be stupid or uninformed or unself-conscious.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, West Germany:
1. This is just the problem I was dealing with in my forthcoming
essay in New LiteraryHistory "History of Literature-Fragment of a
Vanished Totality." I assume that the meaning normally attributed to
the (in text reference) word literaturearose prior to that of a totalityconcept of history which has, by this time, become more than problematic. The first question of a "literary theory" must be: Does it still
make sense to assume that there is a coherent object such as "literature" on which coherent "theories" can be built (which has to be
structured by a series of concepts)?
In other words: in the present moment the main task of literary
theory should not be to establish theories of literature but to think
about the question-what the object (and the role) of our discipline
ought to be, considering that we have now abandoned totalityconcepts of history.
I assume that the result will not be a new "definition" of the term
for the
literature; rather I see two-quite
separate-perspectives
future of Literaturwissenschaft:(a) the development of "normative"
concepts (proposals) for a nonprofessional, pleasure-orientated use of
texts in a future society in which "working time" becomes an increasingly unimportant space (compared to "pastime"); (b) the integration
of a particularly high competence of interpretation and analysis of
texts (the integration of the heritage of Literaturwissenschaft)into other
disciplines such as "history" (especially of "mentalities") and sociology
(especially interactionist sociology).
2. As I do not consider "literary theory" one part of Literaturwissenschaft but rather its "philosophy," there is, on one hand-ideally
speaking-no writing that I publish and no course I teach which is not
in a deductive relation with "literary theory." On the other hand I
write, more and more seldom, purely theoretical articles or books; I
teach, more and more seldom, purely theoretical seminars.
I personally prefer to use my competence as a historian of literature within the field of a "history of mentalities," profiting-I
hope-from theoretical work (in the sense defined above). There is a
mutual (and productive) relation between this kind of work and my
theoretical thinking.
3. Since graduate education normally leads to (and should lead to)
and since I think that
professional activity as a "Literaturwissenschaftler"

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the future (maybe the survival) of our discipline depends on its capacity to find a role adequate to new problems, there cannot be, in my
eyes, any graduate teaching without a continuous theoretical discussion. We have at Ruhr-Universitat Bochum created a Kolloquium
dedicated to the type of questions described in question 1 which is
regularly held every two weeks.
I have to emphasize, however, that "graduate teaching of literary
theory" (in my sense) can only be realized in a true discussion.Its aim is
to enable graduate students (and future colleagues) to think on their
own about the kinds of questions I defined above.
Ihab Hassan, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee:
1. The aim of theory is to heighten our awareness of literary
knowledge and language, and to organize that awareness in new
heuristic perspectives. The heightened awareness of literary knowledge implies the mind's encounter with itself under the aspect of
language; it should also lead to gnostic delight. The heuristic
perspectives should aim at wisdom, right praxis.
2. Though theory holds no priority in my professional life, it has
clearly affected both my writing and teaching. Thus, for instance, my
"paracriticism" reflects postmodern theory and culture no less than
my personal sense of the self. And my teaching has become more
tropic (rhetorical), problematic, comparative, multidisciplinary, and
sometimes abstract, the latter a tendency against which I try to guard.
Quite simply, I teach more literary theory now than I did twenty years
ago, a fact that I regard with acute ambivalence.
3. The shortcomings of theory today? Bad prose, rebarbative jargon, tedious psychomachias. But beyond such lapses and lacks,
graduate education needs to create a nexus of values in literary
studies as well as to provide a continual critique of itself based on
history, ideology, and speculative vision.
In the end, though, I must return to the instigations of desire. I
take it that no human activity can thrive without serving some principle of pleasure as well as will to knowledge and power. Does literary
theory appear to us now a bride of wisdom or an iron maiden? Is
critical discourse a banquet table or a verbal wrack? There is pleasure,
of course, in intellectual beauty, gaiety in the mind's struggle to make
the world ever more conscious, and happiness in the play of language,
which breaks continuously on the soft edge of silence. The critic's
tongue has indeed become more strenuous; now it must learn to
"burst Joy's grape against his palate fine."

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Go/ran Hermeren, Lunds Universitet, Sweden:

1. As to your survey, I find it easier to answer question 1 and
question 3 (since I am not a literary critic). To put it very briefly, I
think that the aim and function of literary theory ought to be to offer
new directions and to revitalize literary scholarship and literary criticism. So did once the New Critics, and so have the best Marxists,
structuralists and semiotic scholars done. I believe that the potential
of the contemporary phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition in
this respect is not fully explored.
3. The shortcoming of literary theory in graduate education is
that its relation to literary, critical, and scholarly practice is not made
explicit. Too often literary theory is discussed separately, and its
relevance becomes, therefore, difficult to grasp. What difference does
it make, in writing about X, what literary theory I use explicitly or
implicitly (take for granted)?
Norman N. Holland, State University of New York at Buffalo:
1. Literary theory has, surely, as one of its aims, the sheer joy of
play. It is, quite simply, fun. For another, literary theory serves to
satisfy our deepest curiosity about the literary process, a task that asks
us to engage in the most profound exploration of human nature,
especially our own.
For me, these two aims are the same.
2. As a result of my theoretical concern with the person, I have
changed utterly my way of teaching and writing. I used to think of
myself and my students as objectively analyzing texts. Now I acknowledge and emphasize the personal response of student, teacher,
and critic. I encourage the conscious use of one's self, one's identity,
really, as a sensing instrument. I no longer think of critical writing as a
report on something other than itself, but as itself a constitutive act
around which we continually focus and create ever new experiences
of both literature and life.
3. The eruption of theory in the last two decades has brought a
vigorous and refreshing intellectuality to the study of literature. By
the same token, unfortunately, literary theory can degenerate into
mere words, an exercise in choplogic-we can become Swift's spider,
ignoring the world around us in order to spin a geometric web of
abstractions out of our own entrails. An absorption in theory sometimes cuts off the study of literature from other human realitiesscience, history, politics, society, a variety of psychologies, the facts of
literary creation, the sociology and economics of our professionfinally, therefore, from both literature and life. At its worst, literary

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theory becomes hermetically sealed against the slightest breath of

common sense.
Wolfgang Iser, University of Constance, West Germany:
1. The aims I consider to be threefold: (a) Frameworks have to be
established in order to make the encounter with literature intersubjectively verifiable. A framework, however, should be more than just a
collection of premises if it lays claim to being a theory; it stands in
need of both revealing and substantiating its basic presuppositions.
This distinguishes literary theory from prevailing types of criticism,
such as literary appreciation or taste-oriented impressionism. If
frameworks fail to tackle the task they were designed for, their inadequacies can be rectified. This does not hold true of literary appreciation, and this is why it tends to lapse into dogmatism.
When the study of literature is under fire-as it is nowadays-it
stands more than ever in need of a type of discourse which both
objectifies and justifies this particular scholastic endeavor.
(b) Literary theory allows for self-reflexivity of interpretation. This
twin focus on what is to be interpreted as well as on what is being
brought to bear in this activity is indispensable in view of the growing
awareness that interpretation itself has its own history. A discovery of
the historically conditioned stances is bound to throw into relief the
viewpoint underlying and operative in each interpretation. In this
respect literary theory initiates a hermeneutical process, in the course
of which past and present are continually mediated.
(c) A basic function of literary theory consists in opening up new
realms of investigation, which so far have not been fully in perspective. The literary medium lends itself to the exploration of the workings of the imagination, to answering questions such as why we stand
in need of fiction and to what extent literature is able to channel the
otherwise diffuse quality of the imaginary into our conscious existence. These pursuits can be subsumed under the general heading of
a cultural anthropology of literature.
2. Theory set me thinking about what it is I want to know while
studying literature. It proved important in my teaching, as I did not
have to impose my own ideas on the students, but could make a case
why the subject under discussion was approached from a certain
angle, and also what the chosen approach was expected to yield. This
enabled students to reflect on their own interests much more intensely, and provided an opportunity for them to test their own ideas
against those I had advanced. In this respect theory functions as a
form of midwifery in teaching.
As to my writing, theory enabled me to ponder issues lying beyond

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the ordinary business of interpretation, such as why we interpret and

to what extent we live by interpreting. Explorations of this kind made
it necessary to look into activities anterior to interpretation, such as
reading and text-processing, which happen in this very activity.
Scrutinizing areas both anterior and posterior to interpretation resulted in an awareness of larger issues, such as the imaginary as the
fountainhead of the literary text, patterns and processes of communication, as well as the way in which human faculties are being
acted upon by the medium of our concern.
3. A basic problem is posed by the fact that theory is more often
than not learned and studied as if it were a subject in its own right and
not an instrument for finding things out. Consequently, students at
times project a theoretical frame of reference onto the text, thus
downgrading it to an illustration of what the theoretical premise entails. Moreover, it proves difficult at times for students to apply theoretical frameworks properly.
This is largely due to the fact that the distinction between theory and
method is either not distinctly drawn or not sufficiently observed.
Theories generally provide premises, which lay the foundation for
the framework of categories, whereas methods provide the tools for
processes of interpretation. Whenever categories are used as techniques, confusion ensues. Shortcomings of this type have a twofold
cause: (a) In literary theory as a discipline the distinction between
theory and method is all too often blurred. (b) In order to apply both
theoretical premises and categories adequately, a certain amount of
philosophic training is required which a great many of our graduate
students lack. Therefore it is all the more necessary on the part of the
theorist to be both sufficiently clear and articulate in regard to what
he intends to put forward.
Wallace Jackson, Duke University:
1. To open texts and contexts. I take this to be the prime function of
literary theory. Theorists seem always and properly engaged in
building the city of criticism and thereby providing a habitation for
sensibility and intelligence.
2. Theory is the way critics see. By which I mean to say that once I
have grasped a principle, that, for example, there are no texts but
only intertexts, I am well advanced on the way to an understanding of
how imagination deploys itself intracanonically. A basic theoretical
principle of this kind underlies my forthcoming study of Pope's poetry.
3. The easiest (and probably the most correct) response is to say

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that the shortcomings are those of the theorists, but perhaps my

problem is with the question itself. It covertly implies a distinction
between theory and, say, other modes of inquiry ("education"),
whereas I prefer to think that theory is the form in which reason
recreates (raises) itself, an objectification of our knowledge and critical wisdom, and thus theory is the apotheosis of our discipline.
Theory is aggregative rather than dispersive, multiple rather than
single, open rather than closed.
Carol Jacobs, State University of New York at Buffalo:
1. To think in terms of "the aims and functions of literary theory"
might well seem to presuppose the distinction between the question of
literature and the question of its theory, as though theory were a
methodology of investigation external to its object of inquiry. Any
study of literature is implicitly or explicitly a theoretical study, even if,
and in a sense all the more tellingly when, it denies itself as such. No
critical analysis can confront the literary text without thinking, if only
unthinkingly, such questions as the nature of representation, of truth,
of language, and of reading. The "ought" in relation to the study of
theory, the necessity of the theoretical, is the ought of literature itself.
2. The theoretical consequences of this are that the teaching of
literature will inevitably coincide with a teaching of critical theory.
The practical consequences are that the best students learn to read,
not only for content, and not only within a variety of received traditions. They learn to read literature, theory, and philosophy, but also,
most remarkably, themselves, which is to say, they learn to write.
3. Theory, therefore, cannot be ascribed to an eccentric group of
critics with a perverse insistence on importing foreign, continental
modes of thought, nor can it be relegated institutionally to one or two
faculty members in a department. The shortcomings of the way in
which theory too often functions in American graduate programs
arise precisely from this forced compartmentalization of the theoretical. The aberrations are many. The most common is the illusion that
one must, or even could, choose between literature and theory, as
though the choice were inevitably political, and often polemical. For
what would it mean to choose "literature" to the exclusion of "theory"
if not a significant ignorance of the object at hand as well as of the
condition of one's own critical enterprise? And what would it mean to
choose "theory" to the exclusion of "literature"? Perhaps the too
common delusion that a critical study of theoretical texts might be
possible without an appropriate coming to terms with the traditional

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literary canon. But more crucial is the potential blindness to the

literarity of the critical text itself.
Hans Robert Jauss, University of Constance:
1. In the last decade the theory of literature was faced primarily
with the task of asserting and methodologically establishing its own
position vis-a-vis the competing paradigms of linguistic poetics,
structuralism, the empirical social sciences, and semiotics. In view of
the new paradigms for the study of the function, effect, and reception
of literature that have recently won wide acceptance-New Literary
History bears witness to this trend-it seems to me that the time has
come to build new bridges to neighboring disciplines. I am thinking,
for instance, of historical anthropology. The new initiatives of this
discipline will especially benefit if the theory of literature succeeds in
distinguishing the aesthetic from other functions of communication
in life, and brings into focus the actual achievements of that productive, receptive, and communicative activity of man which underlies all
experience of art. I am also thinking of the interdisciplinary theory of
understanding. Perhaps a still-to-be-developed literary hermeneutics
might relinquish its theoretical autonomy and, in reflecting on its own
practice, attempt to make clear what possibilities of communication
aesthetic experience has unlocked in the course of its history; indeed,
what possibilities, even today-in opposition to the experiential deterioration of modern industrial society-it might still be able to unlock. Such a hermeneutics could help especially in meeting our pressing need to clear up the conditions, limitations, and obstructions in
communicative practice, as these apply to both our everyday and our
historical existence.
2. At the University of Constance, since its founding in 1967,
literary scholarship has attempted to develop, for future teachers and
experts in various artistic media, curricula that demand equal familiarity with the areas of theory and history, method and application,
interpretation and criticism. These initiatives were at first successful,
were much imitated in the period of German university reform, but
then fell victim, more and more, first to governmental control in the
"counterreform" of the seventies, then finally to a policy of restriction
that had its most adverse effect in Germany upon the university as an
educational institution. The ideas of the "Constance school" are today
practically extinguished in undergraduate study, although they do
live on in an unfortunately elitist postgraduate program.
3. Literary study in the Constance mold allows its graduate so
much freedom for independent research and personal development

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that the postgraduate program is better regarded as a "frame" than as

a system of requirements. Possibilities for interdisciplinary cooperation, however, are not used to full advantage. This is not a failure on
the part of the offerings in theory, but rather a result of the German
government's policy of restriction, since interdisciplinary studies are
not rewarded with academic positions or other vocational opportunities.
Annette Kolodny, University of Maryland:
1. In general, literary theory should function in such a way as to
make us all better readers of the widest possible variety of texts. For
American literary study at this particular historical moment, for
example, that entails the development of theoretical frameworks
which will permit the female, the nonwhite, the non-Anglo, and the
sometimes oral traditions to become, at last, recognized segments
within our multifaceted cultural inheritance. In this way, literary
theory can finally begin taking responsibility for the social consequences of its assumptions and procedures.
To do this, however, means that professors of literature must join
in acknowledging that we all practice (or employ) theory-whether or
not we consider ourselves "theorists." And, whether in the American
literature survey or the Milton seminar, we must make explicit the
theories underpinning our interpretive strategies and paradigms of
literary history. Happily, few in the profession still hold to the notion
of the innocent reader. Even so, too few of us actively incorporate into
the daily classroom dialogue some explanation of the how and why of
our reading methods. As a result, we continue to mystify students
(and one another) as to the magic path by which we move from the
printed page to so elaborate an interpretation of it. In short, literary
theory must come out of the closet of the occasional theory course or
summer institute and acknowledge its presence, where it has always
been, in the literature classroom.
2. At the very least, the term "feminist criticism" implies a challenge to the theoretical constructs and methodological procedures
that have previously blinded literary discourse to women's achievements and to the symbolic encodings of gender within texts. No
feminist critic, therefore, can write or teach without regard for the
ways in which s/he is rejecting or refining established theories and
methods. As a result, individually and collectively, feminist critics are
repeatedly responsible for initiating the academy's most probing
analyses of the generation of literary theory. But in so doing, feminist
critics suffer a peculiar burden.

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Because feminist criticism is not (and does not wish to be) distinguished by any monolithic theoretical proposition or by any single
critical agenda, it continues to develop and to derive its strength from
the very fact of its diversity. No questions are peremptorily put aside;
and with so much remaining to be done, feminist critics-as a
tend to do everything. Our label, however, misgroup-generally
leads. For the fact is, although the term "feminist criticism" has the
status of an umbrella under which diversity and ongoing dialogue
take shelter, many in this profession still hear it as descriptive of a
specific (even dogmatic) procedure or method, on the order of "Marxist" or "psychoanalytic criticism." For colleagues so foolishly inclined,
there is always the temptation to believe that once they've seen (or
read or heard or hired) one feminist critic, they've encompassed us
all. In a sense, then, while our label allows for a valuable statement of
political cohesion, it also contributes to rendering us continually marginal and deplorably underemployed.
One practical consequence is that the feminist critic is thus burdened to explain, in every class s/he teaches and in everything s/he
writes, that her or his work participates in, but may well be radically
different from, the work of other feminist critics. And that repeated
caveat, especially when addressed to nonfeminist colleagues who do
not know our work, has the further consequence of obscuring our
shared concern with questions of theory.
3. The shortcomings, as I see it, reside not so much in theory itself
as in the way theory takes its place within graduate education today.
To begin with, few graduate programs provide any systematic and
comprehensive introduction to the multiplicity of current critical
schools, theories, and debates. One explanation may be that English
departments too often seek out some "star" theorist and subsequently
invest all responsibility for the graduate training of theory in the
hands of this one prominent appointee. Another explanation is the
understandable tendency of departments to become havens for the
like-minded and thus function as centers for one particular school or
method.
To be sure, many a renowned critical theorist honors the value of
introducing her or his graduate students to the widest possible variety
of methods and theoretical orientations. Such a teacher thus avoids
the danger of merely reproducing clones who will forever follow in
the mentor's beaten path. But it is also the case that those who have
attained prominence because of their articulation of some new
theoretical proposition tend to have powerful commitments to passing on their own way of doing and seeing literature. The very passion

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of that commitment can be coercive for the young and impressionable

graduate student, as can the subtle suggestion that the mentor is
initiating the novice into a privileged vocabulary or privileged community.
These are, however, the inevitable risks of the passion and commitment that should properly mark the critical enterprise. To
minimize the more vicious consequences of such risks, I would urge
that we utilize that passion and commitment in such a way as to enlarge and open up debate at the graduate level. This can be accomplished, first, by encouraging all faculty to examine the presence
of theory in their courses; and, second, by requiring that graduate
students be exposed to a variety of theoretical stances and theoretical
practitioners during the course of their formal training. Where a
single department does not boast the necessary diversity, we might
there begin experimenting with regional summer institutes and with
the sharing of faculty between two or more institutions.
Jan Kouwenhoven, University of Edinburgh, Scotland:
1. This question seems to presuppose some kind of situation ethics,
which I cannot espouse. Literary theory should concern itself, at all
times, with whatever problems genuinely suggest themselves, regardless of fashion or expediency; embracing no causes per se, not
even the most tempting of all, apparent common sense. In all its
pursuits, however, it should never lose sight of two axioms: literature
requires valid interpretation; and it has value, in virtue both of what it
is and of what it is about.
Thus occupied literary theory will recognize its ancillary status. For
example, examining the nature of metaphor, it might come up with a
sophisticated version of the view that all literature, or even language
itself, is radically metaphorical; yet it will not persuade itself that this
is somehow a more commanding insight than delicately tuned appreciation of metaphor in, say, Horace, or Keats. In its search for
general truths it will not treat particular works as "cases" but, on the
contrary, try to understand historical and individual "thisness" itself,
extending the hand of fellowship to scholars and biographers and not
even disdaining "writers about their work." If it must deconstruct
anything, it will deconstruct itself rather than literature.
2. I have long been aware that, though all students are, presumably, impressionists in the sense of deriving impressions from what
they read, some articulate these as a matter of course whereas others
remain naturally dumb. In the study of particular works, theory, or

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rather specific theoretical propositions, may usefully be fired at both

categories. They will sometimes induce the silent to talk while they
demand coherence from the voluble.
Whether one should teach theory as such to students early on, when
they usually have little reading experience to apply it to, I do not
really know. Probably one should, at the risk of creating a spurious
sense of mastery and giving rise to insubstantial party strife.
Murray Krieger, University of California, Irvine:
1. In view of the emphases of several recent theoretical movements, I suspect the main business of literary theory should be to
address the question of whether literature exists, and, if so, to determine, in principle, its differences from (or overlappings with)
nonliterature-whatever
that turns out to be. But if the distinction
between literature and nonliterature collapses, then severe questions
must be addressed about the continued existence of literary theory.
We would have to ask whether there is only theory of discourse at
large, into which what we use to call literary theory must be seen to
flow, without differentiation and without privilege. So literary
theory's primary task, in the face of current challenges, is to decide
upon its own status. This decision will help determine its function in
relation to the interpretation and criticism of texts and the realm of
private and public power behind them.
Today literary theory must ask also about the status of theoretical
discourse itself as a text. Is it still responsible for individual acts of
criticism, so that it has what we used to think of as referential obligations to a world of texts for the explanation of which it was thought to
provide a rational structure? Or is it itself an original and autonomous
text demanding the interpretive activity we used to reserve for socalled literary texts? Further, what is its relation to its culture's history
as well as to the history of its own discipline? What attention should be
paid to its earlier practitioners?
Finally, as a result of these explorations, literary theory should be
prepared to address the consequences of its decisions for the function
of academic departments of literature. It can do so only if it confronts,
and seeks to resolve, the unease it feels with respect to its subject and
to itself.
2. For me theory has had significant and continuing consequences
in my activity as a critic, both in teaching and in writing. I am oldfashioned enough to think my theory exists in large part to enlighten
and guide my practice. I insist, in other words, that it be responsive to
requirements for a definition of literature that, in turn, is responsive

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to the brilliant verbal performances by the best works in the Western

literary canon. Recent developments have led me to recognize other,
less text-centered theoretical concerns at the very edge of the literary
as it merges into other texts and other forces in psyche and society,
perhaps also to be read as texts. But finally, I measure what works
theoretically for me by its power to help me work critically upon those
texts that constitute the master syllabus for our courses in literature.
3. After many too many years during which literary theory was
denied a role in graduate education in literature, the recent spread of
theoretical consciousness has, in a good number of institutions, led to
a theoretical arrogance. In many places the way has been opened for
theory to become a major force in graduate study, but many of its
defenders would now turn upon the literature department that has
newly licensed it and would put in question the department's own
license, while claiming the right for theory to be studied on its own. It
sometimes seems ready, then, to deprive that department's subject of
its privilege even while it would privilege itself. Whatever the vulnerability of literature departments to such assaults, I would suggest
that, to the extent that its successes and popularity lead it to succumb
to these temptations, the major shortcoming of theory has been its
failure to define its own limits. A second has been its tendency to
become partisan, if not narcissistic, so that, instead of learning theory,
the student too often is learning a theorist or restricted group of
theorists. So theory, as a subject of study, must try to find its common
subject. Why not begin by exploring the historical development of the
discipline and its texts, up to and including the recent, embattled
movements? Whatever the necessary distortions produced by our
personal commitments, some dispassion and distance resulting from
this exploration might induce corrections leading toward a scholarly
responsibility appropriate to graduate study.
Neil Larsen, University of Minnesota, graduate student:
1. One must start by recognizing that literary theory is in a state of
protracted crisis. The existence of this crisis on the institutional level
has meant an undermining of the professional self-identity and function of the literary scholar/theorist. This in turn has lent a defensive
posture to intellectual work whose capacity to produce social use values is no longer guaranteed by social convention and whose own
internal unity and coherence as a body of theory and analysis is problematic.
This is good in part-it has made it more difficult to maintain the
hegemony of the various positivist and formalist orthodoxies which

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result from the modernist hypostatization of the "literary." It has

allowed for useful debate.
The danger to theory comes in determining its mode of response to
the social pressures exerted upon it, particularly in its ability to distinguish between opportunities to give itself a new and critical/political
effectiveness and demands which simply reflect the needs of the state
(e.g., the restriction of theory, and its subordination, to the study and
description of "national cultures").
The present crisis in literary theory comes of a more radical crisis
which poses the existence of society in its present form as a question.
Given this, literary theory should adopt the measures which are necessary for it to transform itself into a well-defined practice of social
critique and social redirection.
2. A variety of circumstances-my training as a comparatist, previous training in philosophy, political concerns-have made questions
of theory, both literary and otherwise, the main focus of my work as
both graduate student and instructor. Practically speaking, theory has
been my point of departure-in
particular the theory/critique of
ideology.
As might be imagined, the consequences of this have been difficulties in constructing a conceptual object of theorization which embraces both the "literary" texts traditionally assigned to this category
and the "nonliterary" contents which have made theory itself an object of renewed interest and criticism. In the production of critical
"writing" this presents itself as a hesitation before the "simple" task of
"interpreting the text." In teaching it is the seemingly contradictory
job of instructing a canon alongside theoretical approaches which
require that the canon be challenged and questioned as to its basis.
In the one major opportunity I have had to teach a course in theory
(in this case the theory of ideology as it relates to aesthetics) I found
that the students ("honors" undergraduates at the University of Minnesota) had serious difficulties in the "application" of theory to literary texts. This was due neither to an incomprehension of theory nor
to an unfamiliarity with reading literature, but rather to a marked
resistance to the positing of representation as a theoretical problem.
3. Again I should note that my encounters with theory as a
graduate student are probably atypical. In my particular program
theory is heavily emphasized, and there is a considerable degree of
breadth in the theoretical discourses with which one is encouraged to
become conversant (e.g., semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, hermeneutics, etc.). I see no special deficiencies in this type of intellectual
training-I think it has proven advantages.
If there are deficiencies, they are not the result of the educational

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project of learning and elaborating theory, but rather the effect of

having to negotiate the demands which both the tradition and the
uncertain social logic of the profession place on this kind of project.
In this sense the deficiency of literary theory is its hesitancy to move in
the direction of a more powerful and rigorously defined theory of
ideology and sign-culture, lest, by doing this, it give up its claim to
ultimate authority over an exclusively "literary" field of texts, values,
and practices. But meanwhile, this field is losing, or has lost, its social
underpinning, and theory is left hanging.
David Lodge, University of Birmingham, England:
1. Some people regard literary theory as a self-sufficient field of
speculation and deductive reasoning which need not justify itself in
terms of practical application; but I must admit that I myself see its
value primarily as serving the cause of the "better" reading of texts,
by enhancing our awareness of the multiplicity and complexity of the
processes of composition and reading.
2. I think it has been a two-way process: intuitive insights in search
of a theoretical explanation or justification for themselves, and the
encounter with new theories (formalism, structuralism, poststructuralism) provoking one into discovering meanings in texts one might
otherwise have missed.
3. I would put this the other way round: a major shortcoming of
graduate education (and for that matter undergraduate education) in
this country is a lack of coherent, systematic teaching of the theoretical bases of the subject (English)-though at Birmingham we do better than many other institutions.
Adrian Marino, Cluj-Napoca, Romania:
1. Literary theory lies at the very foundations of all esthetics, literary criticism, and literary history. Without a coherent and wellreasoned literary "system" all of these disciplines would be at a complete loss, which often happens. By "literary theory" I mean not only
special theoretical (structuralist, semantic, semiotic) disciplines but
also a general interpretive "system of systems" which at present is
lacking.
Literary theory also has the extremely important function of
analyzing, classifying, and defining basic literary concepts. The
number of "personal," subjective acceptations and definitions is steadily
increasing. The semantics of literary terminology is becoming more
and more individualistic, so to speak, hence the objective necessity of
a "criticism of literary ideas."

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Literary theory is conducive to free literary thinking, a sound alternative to all rigid and dogmatic, rigorously orthodox, literary ideas.
2. Literary theory offers basic conceptual information and orientation to all students of literature. It serves as a true "introduction" to
the theoretical and ideological world of literature. Literary works are
related to categories and placed on various abstract and general levels.
Hence, the development of a double literary response: intuitiveesthetic and reflective-intellectual with the ensuing equilibrium of the
levels. The literary product qua art offers esthetic satisfaction operating simultaneously as an artefact produced in a specific ideological
context which has an explicit or implicit esthetic program presupposing, nay, compelling theoretical reflection.
In my works of criticism, literary theory constitutes at the same
time a starting point, a method, and a target to be aimed at as a
possibly original contribution. Two of my latest works, L'Hermeneutique
de Mircea Eliade (Paris, 1981) and Etiemble ou le comparatismemilitant
(Paris, 1982), are related to an organized hermeneutic and comparative theoretical reflection, which I present as interpretations from
my point of view and in which I "criticize" and offer a "personal"
solution. Essays of this kind would not be possible without a general
hermeneutic and comparative theory. The practical consequence
directs us to personal orientation, stimulation, comparison and research.
3. The shortcomings of literary theories in graduate education,
almost all of them, derive from two sources: (a) Personal studies of
wide range (the Rene Wellek kind) are on the decline or rarely to be
found, so there is a shortage of basic reference works and the teaching
of literary theory inevitably becomes fragmentary and incomplete.
Practically speaking, one can no longer speak of a "complete" course
of literary theory. (b) Pressure exerted by intellectual fashions is almost
everywhere very strong and, therefore, "modern" methods enjoy
priority over "classical"methods. Teachers of literature very often fall
for modern definitions of rhetoric, forgetting the two-thousand-year
standing of the subject. They also forget the no less important fact
that the new definitions simply repeat or "rediscover" ideas that are
well known. What is essentially lacking at the moment are detailed
courses in the history of the literary idea, of rhetoric, poetry, and so
forth. Works uniting all the aspects of literary study are likewise lacking. Fragmentariness runs counter to synthesis while fashions run
against confrontation and historical perspective.
Henryk Markiewicz, University of Krakow, Poland:
1. I consider as main tasks of literary theory at the present time: (a)
further reflection on the regularities of literary process, surmounting

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the Marxist-structuralist alternative; (b) development of a "grammar

of the literary text," especially a theory of "great semantic configurations" (e.g., characters, space configurations, plot as opposed to narrative scheme); (c) elaboration of a canon of description of literary
works; (d) methodological reflection on modes of argumentation in
literary criticism and on standards of valid interpretation.
2. I think that, owing to literary theory, my teaching of literature
and my essays in criticism are more systematic, precise, conscious, and
persuasive.
3. These shortcomings are connected with the speculative and
abstruse character of many of today's theoretical efforts. But they are
also caused by intellectual weaknesses of students who are unable to
apply their theoretical knowledge to practical criticism.
Vida E. Markovic, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia:
1. Now that we are witnessing the process of the "revaluation of all
values" and the hitherto unquestionably accepted principles of literary theory are brought into question, it is literary theory that ought to
offer a basis, or better a point of departure, to combat the general
fluidity and reaffirm the basic assumptions governing the rules of the
game in the art of literature.
Its functions should continue to be to keep the heritage of literary
theory of the past fully alive and to offer the necessary guidelines to
the study of literature so that, once this radical reexamination has
reached point zero, toward which it is heading, and a period of reintegration has set in, the study of literature can continue its uninterrupted course without having suffered any permanent damage.
2. It is by falling back upon literary theory that I could direct my
students toward the reading, and from there to the appreciation and
evaluation of literary texts. Without an awareness of a literary work
as aform I could neither have taught literature as an ontologically
autonomous art, nor could I have firmly grounded any of my writings
of criticism. Unless the student is made aware of a literary work as a
form, which offers certain possibilities to the author, on the one side,
and determines the scope of the reader's expectation, on the other,
the literary work cannot have its real effect, exercise its full impact
on the student. The invisible line separating a literary text from that
of mere information, even of the highest order, gets obliterated; the
actual meaning of the work, contained in the inseparable unity of
form and content, gets lost: literature, bereft of its ontological nature,
is reduced to yet another avenue of information. And it is just what
literature alone can offer, beyond information, that makes it unique
and invaluable.
3. If properly used, within the confines of its referential field,

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literary theory can only contribute to graduate education. If superimposed on the study of literature, treated as a pursuit with no reference
to the study of literature proper, i.e., if mechanically used-like
chasing a single poetic image in say a novel, a poem, a drama, or a
story, with no reference to its meaning or function in the work as a
whole-literary theory becomes irrelevant. Separated from its object
it becomes meaningless.
Jerome J. McGann, California Institute of Technology:
1. The purpose of theoretical work, in any practical discipline like
literary study, is to expose the grounds and premises on which one's
scholarly work is based. Theory is intramural and reflexive, and
comments on practice. It ought to improve the study of literature/literary works either by improving (refining, disciplining) one's
normal practice, or by suggesting new avenues of approach.
2. My own theoretical studies, in the past eight years at any rate,
were deliberately undertaken to enable a more salient kind of historically grounded critical practice. It has always seemed to me selfevident that literature is a form of social and cultural practice, and
hence that literary study had to be historically grounded, and historically self-conscious. To the reigning forms of ahistorical criticism
(they are legion, and still dominant), nothing could be less selfevident. Consequently, I found it impossible to practice my own
work, in the present academic climate, without acquiring a clearer and
more self-conscious grasp of my own scholarly and critical premises.
3. Despite the hostile responses which theoretical work sometimes
draws to itself nowadays, and despite the mere fashionableness of so
much current theoretical work, I do not see that theory is an area
which shows any special educational shortcomings. The problems one
sees in graduate studies seem to me a function of a more general
decline in scholarly skills and standards. Since your question is not
addressed to this matter, however, I will forebear expatiating on it.
Ronald Paulson, Yale University:
1. Literary theory should illuminate works of literature-within as
well as outside the canon-and also, I believe, works outside "literature" itself. I mean that literary theory is beneficially applied to the
underdeveloped areas, for example art history and history. Literary
theory has led us in the last couple of decades to deal with much more
than the discrete work of literature-with series of works, their authors, ambiences, audiences, and so on. Secondarily, the function of

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literary theory can be (in a sense must be) to direct the student back
into the study of literary theory itself-and so to bring theory back,
once again renewed, to illuminate works of literature.
I suppose you mean, from practice-has led
2. Theory-divorced,
me to rethink my own practice and return to it with a freer, more
open mind. It has also, in graduate teaching, led me to place more
emphasis than I used to on different methodologies, their use by
critics, and their relative appropriateness to this or that body of
literary-historical materials.
3. The only shortcoming of literary theory-or rather its present
hegemony-for graduate study is that, since we are at a breakthrough
and consolidation stage, there is a tendency to replace as well as augment the teaching of the canon with the teaching of literary theory.
Much as I respect the theoretical work of the last decades, I am sometimes disappointed to see graduate students emerge knowing more
about current theories than about Milton or Shakespeare; and, a second consequence, feeling that a dissertation, essay, or book that is not
"at the cutting edge" critically-indeed, that is not about theory-is
inferior. I wish it were not beneath the dignity of some graduate
students to edit a text or carry out old-fashioned research; I also wish
it was a more common practice to start with the text and original
research and then build appropriate critical models upon this firm
foundation. The order of priority for graduate study has to remain:
knowledge of the canon, knowledge of how to teach and write about
literary texts, knowledge of the historical context (e.g., critical theory)
of these texts, and knowledge of contemporary critical theory, first as
applicable to the texts, and second for its own sake. Having reached
this spot, some graduate students may want to specialize in the history
of critical theory or in critical theory per se.
David Punter, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England:
1. To address itself to the interpretation of the reading act in the
contemporary cultural context; to demonstrate for us the location
which the "unaccompanied word" is coming to have in a world where
habitual learning patterns are now largely characterized by the condensed hieroglyphs of commercial and political persuasion; to lay out
the ground on which reflexivity can be understood, so that students
and teachers alike can come at a better understanding of the subjects
(selves) which the literary text is designed to produce; thus to assist in
constructing a correct political discrimination between texts.
To produce a new and more sophisticated understanding of the
processes whereby text becomes commodity, and cultural intercourse

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is reduced to the model of the exchange of currency; to recognize and

work with the fact that the old literary function of the provision and
refinement of self-images has now largely passed to other cultural
forms (popular music, debased political rhetoric, journalistic practice), and to seek on that basis an understanding of the role of the
"contemporary literary"; to develop ways in which, pedagogically, the
blocked circuits which should connect literature with the expansion of
the imaginary and of fantasy can be revitalized.
2. The works of Barthes and Foucault in particular offer theory in
ways which can be made over into the act of teaching, because they
deal in the "becoming" of knowledges, in the actual modes of reproduction and acquisition which characterize education. They encourage us to think seriously about strategies and thus about the hidden
"interests" which the text serves. This is an area where students need
to experience demystification if they are to perceive the more detailed
and local structures of literature as effective in terms of their own
experience.
Much of the energy deployed in writing criticism now seems to me
to be useful only insofar as it relates to the pedagogic; there has been a
flow of lifeblood from education, economically and symbolically, and
this needs to be reversed by the encouragement of a serious reflexivity
about the nature of our activities as teachers of literature, and about
what it is that we "hold" for the wider society. Unless we can effect
such connections, we will find ourselves genteelly inhabiting a
museum, with the "modern" products of Marxism and feminism no
less securely encased in glass than the traditionalisms we profess to
despise and supersede.
3. The comparative absence of reflexivity means that many critics
and theorists, even when they are writing about the construction and
deconstruction of the subject, do not contemplate the selves they are
endeavoring to produce in their readers; those selves often are not
ones familiar to or valued by students at undergraduate level. At
postgraduate level, this becomes the ground for a schizophrenic phenomenon: students repeat and try to internalize progressive formulations, while being still bounded by the formal individualism of research; advance in theoretical understanding comes to seem indistinguishable from a loss of felt authenticity.
Postgraduates are the "adolescents" of the symbolic family system
of higher education, but we can no longer promise them a future;
they hope that by acquiring the protective coloring of theory, they can
somehow escape this fate, but in fact this acts as a pacifier to their
incipient revolt. Rather than theory, I believe that what the higher
teaching of English is in need of is method,a concentration on placing

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instruments for analysis securely in the hands of students, so that they

can come at a less mysterious understanding of the text, and simultaneously see the complex of social and psychological relations which
characterizes the social system of the educators.
David S. Randall, State University of New York at Binghamton,
graduate student:
1. The aims and functions of contemporary literary theory ought
to be to continue articulating a variety of fundamental questions
concerning the inquiry into its "disciplinary" nature. This inquiry
ought to pursue the liberation of literary theory to determine its own
"proper" ends, by recognizing those elements in its past and present,
especially in the economic and political contexts in which theoretical
priorities have been established, which have philosophically perpetuated what Nietzsche has called the spirit of "ressentiment."This
recognition is a means toward transvaluating expectations and ends,
as well as exploring and exposing ideological inconsistencies and
equivocations. This inquiry ought to recognize the source of such
value judgments as dynastically attempting to determine and define
the existence of the so-called literary object as well as recognize the
tendency of contemporary literary theory to oppose the systematizing
of the question of interpretation, which, as Martin Heidegger has
suggested, is ultimately the question of understanding. Further, this
inquiry ought to recognize and accept its critical "failure of consensus" without irritably reaching after the alleged facts of its "structural"
frame of reference, formal literary semiosis, or the apparent rationality of the relationship between literary production and political
economies.
2. The practical consequences or implications of the current crisis
in theory has influenced my teaching, which if we follow Derrida is
ultimately a form of writing, by rendering it an inquiry into unintended commitments and accidental alliances. This hermeneutical inquiry has disclosed practices and assumptions which were being exercised informally and implicitly, especially in the realm of"rhetoric," in
which a relentless methodological attachment to the technology of
Platonic and neo-Aristotelian persuasion harbors particular ideological and philosophical entanglements. This inquiry invariably implies
alternative strategies of reading, which appear to involve possibilities
for change in the aim(s), function(s), and relevance of literature itself,
reverberating in the shifting significance of criticism as well as literary
theory. Essentially, contemporary literary theory has not merely
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odologies of scholarship structurally, destructively, and deconstructively, but, perhaps more important, it has revitalized the sclerotic and
obscured problematic of language itself. To assert that this consequence of contemporary literary theory ought to be (or has been) one
of its primary intentions or functions would be indicative of an all too
familiar rational impulse. Nevertheless, it is crucial that students of
both writing and teaching reassess their understanding of language,
its "prescribed" aims and functions, in light of as well as in the sundry
shades of darkness that theory illuminates.
3. At the level of graduate education a few shortcomings of theory
include: (a) the perpetuation of an ambience of seemingly irresolvable
and violent ideological warfare among its privileged "theorists," and
(b) a ubiquitous anxiety surrounding its students, since mere lip
service is institutionally extended to the necessary interdisciplinary
conceptual instruction essential to encountering the current critical
crisis. This anxiety in the academy has been heightened in part since
the shift from scholarship to speculation engendered principally by
the general distrust of and inquiry into the conventional paradigms of
analysis referred to previously. Graduate learning is theoretically a
forum for educational exploration and experimentation but, in terms
of praxis, it becomes a coercive disciplinary instrument for the imposition of exclusive categories of thinking, standard discourse systems,
and distinctively defined opportunities. Hence, graduate education
becomes a review of the inscribed forces of theory, literature, and
language; a panoptic overview of the strategic and occasionally solipsistic skirmishes between licensed practitioners; as well as a preview of
the nihilistic potential of the hermeneutical circle of ressentimentextensively sustaining theoretical dialectic. These remarks asserting
certain inadequacies of theory in an academic context are not intended to imply a desire or direction for "reform," merely the hermeneutical awareness that all knowledge or understanding is neither
totally theoretical nor practical. Both theory and practice legislate a
priori assumptions, and what must be questioned in this "quandary" is
the partial and contextual nature of interpretation.
Philip Rice, University of Birmingham, England, graduate student:
1. The problematizing of literature as a category suggests the need
to dismantle the concept of a purely "literary" theory, and the need to
install, in its place, a broader "critical" or "cultural" theory which can
deal with a variety of cultural productions, including the literary.
On a more specific level, however, and other than maintaining its
critique of the assumptions of traditional criticism, the aim of literary

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theory at present ought to be to introduce more rigorous forms of

analysis which are more firmly grounded on adequate and coherent
theoretical foundations. What is called for, in order to lay such foundations, is further investigation of the material relations between author, text, and reader: investigations which take cognizance of the
instance of the text chosen for analysis-either the moment of its
production or the moment of its reproduction-with a concomitant
consideration of its sociohistoric context. That activity which treats the
text as "hermetic object to be revealed" must be displaced in favor of
forms of analysis which describe the conditions of emergence of a text
(what makes a particular text possible at the moment of its appearance); which examine the discourses it draws upon and the kinds of
knowledge it sets in circulation and gives form to; which analyze the
status it is accorded in the hierarchies of discourses; and which describe the systems of determination (the discursive practices) through
which a textual hermeneutic is projected and actualized.
2. I have tried to evolve a practical methodology for dealing with
the text which does not reinstate it as an object replete with meaning(s) to be uncovered by the literary gaze. This has meant treating
the text as an object from the cultural archive and subjecting it to the
analytic procedures outlined above, mapping out the practices of
writing and reading through which it is produced and reproduced, to
uncover, on the one hand, the general epistemological configuration
and, on the other, the discourse-specific rules of formation of those
textual objects, always bearing in mind the way those same texts
change historically and according to the different paradigmatic
frames through which they are realized. This has entailed looking at
discourses (such as the social, political, and philosophical) and texts
(such as journalism and popular fiction) other than the "literary."
3. Theory has tended to be treated as a secondary activity to the
central enterprise of interpreting the "great works": there has been a
tendency to see it either as providing a new set of pragmatic tools,
potentially liberating interpretive constraints to yield ever more ingenious readings of texts, or to see it as having little to do with, or to
offer to, the everyday activity of literary studies. It has had to counteract a marginalizing position as too rarefied to deal with actual texts,
or has been pressed into the service of interpreting the already
canonized corpus. Such defusing and appropriating of theory has
tended to endorse, rather than displace, the dominance of textual
interpretation, and has maintained the rigid discipline boundaries
that it should be helping to break down by bringing into visibility
forms other than the valorized literary text.

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Robert Schwartz, Oregon State University:

1. To answer this question in its broadest and most practical form
first, I take the function of theory to be to help us to define the canon,
to establish which works merit study and appreciation and which do
not. This can seem only an accidental end of methodology, but it
remains, to my mind, the intention of theory. Put a little less broadly,
though, literary theory should attempt to provide the logical and
philosophical assumptions on which analysis and hence judgment
could be based. And in this regard it should seem, at least insofar as
on this level it is "scientific" and descriptive, not to imply ideological
judgments. Whether it is possible or not to describe the workings of
language and texts without fitting the descriptions into a framework
free of personal assumptions, though, is a serious question. At any
rate, in addition to trying to describe how language and texts work,
theory should also attempt to explain how and why these workings
have been and can be so variously interpreted; that is to say, how and
why we judge literature as we do given what we assume about what it
is and how it is transmitted. It is not necessary (nor possible, I think) to
consider literature as a unique form of discourse and hence establish a
vocabulary and interpretative base that applies only to literary texts.
2. There is much that I could say about this, starting, for example,
with the observation that theory has set for me parameters (personal
and wide though they may be) of what can be ruled in or ruled out of
interpretation. But more important than any methodological influence is a more general shift in my attitude toward texts. The complexities and contradictions of theoretical perspectives have left me, in
my classroom and in my study, like Philip Sidney's Poet who "nothing
affirmes, and therefore never lyeth." I am so aware of the shifting
sands of theory that I am reluctant to take a very firm stand on the
final significance or meaning of a text. At first I considered this to be a
kind of unfortunate fear of saying or thinking something that was or
would soon be wrong. But I find it has grown into a fully blown
eclecticism that I am really quite comfortable with. I am less concerned with what texts "mean" in any absolute or demonstrable sense,
and more concerned with how and why different readers at different
times find different meanings and values in the same text. I don't
believe that theory has influenced the texts that I choose to teach or
write about.
George Steiner, Churchill College, Cambridge, England:
1. Properly used, the word theory entails categories of potential
verification/falsification, more or less controlled experimentation,

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and formalization (along the lines, say, of Popper's usage or of the

usage of the word in the exact and the natural sciences).
Applied to literature or the arts, theory is, at best, a metaphoric
"loan" (a rubato) and, at worse, a piece of obscurantist pretense. What
we have in serious arguments about or methodological orderings of
works of literature and of art are "rational mythologies," "discursive
scenarios"-e.g., a Marxist or a psychoanalytic reading of a text, an
"ontological" construing, as in Heidegger, a myth of the absent subject, as in the poetics of Mallarme and of his deconstructive epigones.
Such programmatic mythologies can be of great strength and suggestion: they are not "theories" in any responsible sense.
2. My students and I do our very best to learn to read together. We
seek to bring to bear on the manifold and historically metamorphic
lives of the text the "speculative instruments" (Coleridge) of linguistics, of philology, of hermeneutics. The result is, when luck and
concentration hold, an explication de texte, always provisional, always
and explicitly "at the service of" the poetic-creative act. I regard as
pretentious absurdity current claims for the equivalence in importance or specific gravity of text and commentary. The existentialtemporal dependence of the latter upon the former is not only a
matter of elementary logic, but of moral perception.
3. Wittgenstein spoke of "the exact arts." This is the best description I know of the significant but (ultimately) minor exercise of interpretation and of criticism. The current stress on alleged
"theory"-any fool can compose neological abstractions, any fool can
draw boxes and arrows and adorn them with pseudoalgebraic
notations-is, very possibly, a symptom of that failure of creative
nerve and that academic barbarism which one calls "Byzantium."
Alvin Sullivan, Southern Illinois University:
1. Over the last decade many theorists, working independently,
have arrived at concepts that seem at least on the surface to be similar.
It is perhaps time to analyze some concepts and assumptions to see if
synthesis is possible. An example is the concept of text, as an entirely
new vocabulary has developed to explain literary texts: Riffaterre's
hypogram,Todorov's pheno-textand geno-text, Barthes' writing degreezero
and Ricoeur's qualification of relative degree zero, for example.
Perhaps as a result of such efforts we might aim at more precise
labels for "kinds" of critics. Structuralists, deconstructionists,
phenomenologists, or semioticians constitute at present a collage if
not an impressionist blur. Are there more useful categories? What
tenets or assumptions will underlie them? What common critical vocabulary might be used?

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Some synthesis may also let us get back to literary texts as "primary"
ones, rather than critical texts. While criticism ought to be as "good"
as literary texts, it should not replace (displace?) them. I am somewhat
abashed at conferences to find leading critics misquoting texts, especially when their criticism is so linguistically oriented that each word
and its grammatical position in a line of poetry is crucial to their
conclusions.
2. (a) Most of my undergraduate students seem to have been
taught only formalist analysis and to regard formalist concepts as
reifications. I try to get them to regard the text as experiential, to
discuss it as literary discourse, and to discover its features before they
give them names. These "inductive" techniques, though hardly original, owe to my reading of literary theory that which makes me question some of the assumptions that students glibly hold.
(b) The gestation period for writing criticism is shorter, the time in
writing much longer. Usually I "see something" in a text I am not sure
of, and randomly read critics I like (Iser, Hartman) to see if something connects. Publishing those connections is admittedly difficult,
especially if I leave the "raw" theoretical considerations in. One paper
started off theoretically and turned very soon to a literary text.
Editors objected that I was "confusing" critics and distorting them.
But when the theory went into footnotes and the paper began "traditionally" with a poetic title and allusion, the paper was accepted by the
next journal I sent it to.
3. The university where I teach has only M.A. students. Most of
them have difficulty reading and condensing theoretical essays. A few
who have been trained in philosophy as well as literature like to
analyze theories, to place them in context, and to find inconsistencies.
Thus, the shortcomings belong more to my students than to literary
theory. It would be very helpful if these beginning graduate students
had available a text that classified critical positions, placed them in
context, and applied new critical concepts to specific works of literature.
Harvey Teres, University of Chicago, graduate student:
1. It is difficult to give a comprehensive answer to this questionthe field is too diverse and my experience as yet too limited for an
overall perspective. But there are certain emphases and directions
which I would like to see develop. In particular, literary theory ought
to begin to exercise its proper "civil" function by intervening in political matters which since the Cold War have been isolated from the

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purely literary. In the past half-century we have created extraordinarily effective tools for analyzing literary texts, yet we have taken
seriously neither the extent to which these texts are embedded in a
society with interests, authority, and power, nor the extent to which
these texts and our criticism comprise part of the political discourse of
the nation, a discourse which might very well be better understood
and elevated through our intervention. The aim here ought not to be
that literary theorists become partisans or polemicists, but that we
exercise our responsibilities as scholars and citizens in an effort to
equip the public to more knowingly "read" the vast network of political issues, policies, and events which shape their lives.
2. Because literary theory encourages us to generalize about specific literary phenomena, it significantly alters our practical work in
the direction of inclusiveness and interdisciplinary approaches. We
are rarely content with close readings alone, no matter how ingenious
or sensitive, and we are impatient with narrowly focused studies that
"merely want to deal with the facts." Instead, we strive for farreaching allusions, analogies, syntheses. We labor to make our work
intelligible as philosophy, linguistics, history, or political science as
well as literary criticism, and we necessarily broaden curriculum, syllabi, classroom discussion, bibliography, and so forth. This new spaciousness, however, as welcome and potentially liberating as it is, also
brings a kind of bewildering, even paralyzing open-endedness to our
work, as if to ask a single question forces us to want to ask a hundred
others, most of which we must omit. Our practical work becomes to a
great extent a place of vulnerability-which is as it should be.
3. Because American critics have embraced literary theory comparatively recently, and often neither have the training nor assimilate
the tradition of their European counterparts, the teaching of theory
can lack the depth which often accompanies long familiarity, and
continuous dialogue and experiment. As for the students, most of
them have been trained in an educational system which teaches empiricism and pragmatism at the expense of speculation and theory,
and in the field of literature students remain largely the products of
New Critical approaches. Thus, graduate students often lack the skills
and desire for doing theoretical work, and much of what is taught in
graduate theory courses is at the relatively low introductory level.
This is especially true, I might add, with regard to Marxist theory,
where misconceptions and resistance add to the difficulties. I expect
this situation will be remedied in part by integrating theory into the
teaching of literature at all educational levels, a task which yet remains.

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Eugene Vance, University of Montreal, Canada:

1. Literary theory should have four principal aims. First, to help us
to define the specificity of the poetic or "literary" text as a constitutive
element of Western culture; second, to equip the student of literature
to grasp and criticize the theory immanent in the literary performance itself; third, to encourage the student to rethink the history of
literature by perceiving the models inherent to that history as being,
themselves, historical; fourth, to renew the production of literature
itself: literary theory tends to be a generative force.
2. As a medievalist, I have discovered a vast but neglected aspect of
medieval culture thanks to the priorities of structural and poststructural criticism. To the degree that problems of language and of discourse analysis may be said to have dominated critical theory of the
last two decades, such problems coincide with the intellectual
priorities of medieval culture itself, as expressed by the three disciplines of the trivium. A complete revision of our understanding of
medieval poetics is now in order. Moreover, this new medievalism
tends to interest nonmedievalists as much as medievalists themselves:
hence, its potential for changing the status of medieval studies in the
modern curriculum.
3. The shortcomings of literary theory stem from its hybrid nature:
it is neither pure philosophy, pure history, pure anthropology, and so
forth; not even pure criticism. Literary theory is therefore often
shallow, unsystematic (and even untheoretical), and boring, especially
when it becomes an end in itself. It often becomes a substitute for
knowledge or for genuine critical intelligence. Literary theory has also
shifted too much attention away from older cultures (e.g., the classics,
Judaic studies, the Middle Ages), though I believe that this is a temporary phase.
Evan Watkins, Michigan State University:
1. Theory offers a means of reintegrating literary study with the
study of cultural relationships of all kinds. Its aim is then not only to
make explicit the assumptions which govern various and competing
strategies of textual analysis, but also to work toward overcoming the
divisions of specialized intellectual labor without itself becoming one
more specialized discourse in turn. Thus theory is both interpretive
and productive. Its interpretive or critical function is, broadly, historical: theory tries to understand how literature and the study of literature come to occupy a specific position within an ensemble of cultural
relations; it explores the conceptual structures which result in the
concrete multiplicity of critical practices as they have developed his-

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torically; it asks what ideological interests inform those practices, what

cultural and political ends they serve; it tries to assess the material
effects of texts; it charts the historical itinerary of ideas. Theory is also
productive, not because it "produces" an object of study, but because
it attempts to change existing cultural conditions. It is in this sense
that theory is "self-reflexive," as its norms of interpretation, of historical knowledge and critical understanding are regrounded in the political role of intellectuals.
2. I came to graduate school with a double major in English and
Philosophy, and literary theory was immediately attractive as a way to
overcome what had been a radical division in my own studies. My
dissertation was on R. P. Blackmur (who remains for me the most
complex and interesting of the American New Critics), an attempt to
identify the peculiar relations between New Critical practice and the
traditions of philosophical aesthetics. My reading of Croce for the
dissertation later became a long chapter on Croce in The Critical Act,
which in turn led me to Gramsci and to the remarkable achievements
of political criticism in Italy, from De Sanctis to della Volpe. Almost
from the beginning, then, my interest in reading, in writing about,
and in teaching twentieth-century literature developed within a matrix of theoretical understanding. Thus in answering, I would rephrase
your question slightly: theory is what poses the issue of "practical
consequences," forces us to ask what we are doing and why, focuses
on the social results of intellectual activity.
3. The sheer quantity of scholarship, and the growing multiplicity
of critical practices, are very real problems. Yet theory too often takes
as its object a way to provide some conceptual "framework" for this
multiplicity instead of trying to understand what actual social and
cultural factors have brought it about. As a result, current theory
engages everywhere an entire complex range of issues and values, but
in the disguised form of (usually) competing "frameworks," "coordinating hypotheses," and "radical redirections" of textual analysis. It
then offers to students no curricular means to grasp how these issues
have developed, how it is they find themselves in the midst of an
always expanding bibliography. It asks them to "coordinate" and "redirect" what they have been given no way of understanding in the first
place. My graduate students have read Derrida before ever encountering Husserl; they know what is "wrong" with Northrop Frye before
they can locate his name in the card catalogue. (Thus in one of the
most curious reversals of Marx, ideas are discounted as soon as they
begin to be disseminated.) Theory must face squarely the possibility
that the multiplicity of critical practices doesn't result from the absence of organizing methodological frameworks-of which there are

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HISTORY

now surely enough to add to the confusion-but

rather from the
historical development of literary study in the university and the
anomalous position of literary intellectuals in contemporary society.
No theory can direct change without also being historical.
Kenneth Watson, Duke University, graduate student:
1. Coleridge long ago called for a criticism truly philosophical, and
sought it in the nomination of the organic genius at the center of some
texts. The textual unfolding of the central genius has been
reinscribed subsequently over and over. Yet even Coleridge was never
able to reveal the genius centrally, and in his own works the genius
always appears ex-centrally, in the margins of texts which propose
themselves as books, but are never the books they propose themselves
to be; they are always preludes to some future inscription. In the same
way, we ourselves nominate centers, especially when we answer questions about theory's aims, and again in the same way find ourselves
ex-nominated, exiled from the coherence and unity which the nomination of centers produces to what we may call a periphery-where
we inscribe an arc, then infer a new circle within which we attempt to
replace ourselves. Theory's task is the actual involvement in and elaboration of these operations, and at the present time represents the
space of writing.
Theory's provisional aim is to make (and fill) this space. Theory has
never failed to provide the mere space in which to write, though it has
often understood itself as the renunciation of theory while its involvements have made this provision. Theory makes this space by
propelling a continuous restructuring of the institutions of the text and
of the protocols of reading. Its involvement is historical; psychological
and political, it elaborates those operations which structure institutions of the self and of society with regard to texts.
This mere space is at the same moment figural space, the result of a
historical pressure which defers single variants, and produces instead
an entanglement of (near) doublings. The space of figuration unfolds
an economy radically deprived of signifieds, and theory receives another provisional aim in the attempt to supply them. But whatever
theory supplies in this attempt immediately becomes figural in turn.
Theory's revolution occurs in a space of figures which recede as
theory redoubles and articulates them, so that, for instance, sons become fathers and then sons again, with a fatherly difference. Thus the
certain privilege of the historical reenforces itself upon the linguistic
and ontological considerations of figuration-which in turn reenforce
themselves upon the historical. By this writing, theory is marked by a

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IN THE UNIVERSITY:

A SURVEY

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certain aimlessness, and by a richness and complexity of functions

which simultaneously supply and dispel provisional aims.
2. Courses conceived through periodicity, movements, and
"schools," through traditional canons and genres, and through the
sustained study of single writers, make up the literary curriculums of
most colleges, and most teachers of literature were trained in such
curriculums, have examined them thoroughly, and continuously
question the values and assumptions on which they are based. Theory
here provides a means for an evolving interrogation and revision of
the frameworks through which and in which we teach, and a means of
moving that interrogation out of committee meetings and specialized
journals and into the classroom, where students as well as teachers can
profit from and contribute to it. Pedagogically, there has always been
sufficient flexibility in this framework for the selective application of
specialized interpretive methods. My feeling is the more the better.
Since much contemporary theory encourages a more or less promiscuous interweave of textualities, it also encourages varied theoretical
approaches to the examination of canonized texts-and provides
some means for the educative experience of evaluating the results.
This implication that any rigid distinction between the exoteric and
the esoteric hobbles teaching holds true for the writing of criticism.
Contemporary literary theory and its multidisciplinary contexts
open ways of reading and of questioning reading that literary criticism cannot ignore. Consequently, as critics we are forced to move
into, and to some extent co-opt, any number of divergent and (to us)
esoteric discourses. The superficial effect of this attempted co-optation
is the discomfort of the unfamiliar ("jargon"). The effect one naturally hopes for is a more detailed, fluent, and resourceful address to
the array of questions that texts confront us with. That this effect is
within reach is demonstrable with reference to any number of recently published essays in criticism.
3. Theory certainly has an important place in graduate education,
and every graduate program should be staffed with a teacher who
numbers theory among his major interests. It is probably mistaken to
train any students exclusivelyas theorists, just as it would be mistaken
to train any students without explicit reference to theory. One reason
is that the market won't bear it; another and more important is that
thought itself demands the association of theory with practice. Still, no
matter what the program, every student finally gets the training he
wants on his own, and establishes his credentials as he thinks he
should, or must, as best he can. The fault, if any, lies not with theory
or with programs, but with ourselves.