Construing and Deconstructing

This age of critical discourse about literature is the best of times or it is the worst of times, depending on one’s point of view; but there’s no denying that it is a very diverse and lively time. Never before have the presuppositions and procedures of literary criticism been put so drastically into question, and never have we been presented with such radical alternatives for conceiving and making sense of literary texts. Among the competing theories that have come to the fore only within the last several decades we find reader-response criticism (itself divisible into a variety of subspecies), reception-criticism, anxiety-of-influence criticism, structuralist criticism, semiotic criticism, and — most ominous to many traditional ears — deconstructive criticism. It was not many years ago that announcements of jobs for professors of English and other literatures began to be supplemented by requests for professors of literary criticism. Now we find increasing requests for professors of the theory of criticism — professors, that is, whose profession is meta-criticism.