Recent Directions in Critical Theory

Abstract

If Critical Theory Since 1965 had been published by Norton, it would probably have been called The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Critical Theory, for there is no question that writing about the study of literature has become virtually a recognizable genre of text production. Having freed itself from the idea that criticism enjoys a parasitic relationship to primary literary texts, such writing enjoys the prerogatives vying for equal importance with conventionally identified literary genres, of viewing itself as making the recognition of literature possible by defining the parameters of the literary phenomenon, and of sustaining a tension between literary text production and other forms of cultural production that legitimates the ideological role of both literature and criticism in societies.