2 Introduction

such mastery, truth-seeking, and systematic closure; paradoxically, they

sometimes adopt a radically anti-theoretical stance.2 Thirdly, 'theory'
may connote a poetics or aesthetics concerned not with interpretation
of texts but with theorizing discourse in general. The third mode of theory
is especially offensive to traditional critics who are struggling to protect the
boundaries of their literary discipline.
It would be wrong to see the sequence of theories presented in this
volume as an unfolding progression. Within Russian Formalism there are
a number of diverging tendencies. Problems of classification abound. To
take a single example, the so-called Bakhtin School (Bakhtin, Voloshinov
and Medvedev) combines formalist and Marxist perspectives. The politi-
cal complexities of this amalgam are such that historians of criticism find
it difficult to agree whether the School is essentially formalist or Marxist.
The critical concepts which evolved from Saussurean linguistics have been
dispersed and disseminated in various unpredictable ways. The concept of
the sign, for example, is a site of endless debate. At one extreme, the texts
of classical structuralism attempt a definitive description of every kind of
social structure. For them, a structure governs a determinate system of
signs in which the individual sign is a fixed component linking signifier
and signified in happy solidarity. At the other extreme, the grammatology
of Derrida and the later writings of Roland Barthes destabilize the sign's
integrity by releasing within it the warring forces of signification which
earlier structuralists had sought to contain.

It is extremely difficult to divide the general history of twentieth-century

literary criticism into coherent groupings. This is partly because the
histories of criticism in different countries have not followed the same
trajectories. Cultural particularities have given quite different accents to
the paradigms of critical discourses. For example, while there has been a
dominant formalism in every cultural tradition, the patterns of dominance
have differed, and the modes of formalism have been differently articu-
lated. The late reception in the West of Russian Formalism and Czech
structuralism entailed a general belatedness in European and American
critical awareness. While there are similarities between New Criticism and
Russian Formalism, the latter was moving rapidly towards a structuralist
position as early as the late 1920s.
The lines of twentieth-century criticism in this volume were intended to
trace the developments following the period of geological shift. However,
no account of the formalist and structuralist phases in critical history can
avoid returning to the early twentieth century for the crucial antecedents

See Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, 'Against theory', Critical Inquiry, 8
(1982), 723-42.