ABSTRACT
The structuralist revolution in contemporary theory had just as great an impact upon the function of the critic as it had upon the text. It coincided with the rapid expansion of university education after the war, and consequently with the increasing professionalisation of academic criticism, and it introduced a tendency to assume that theory could only be talked about in the most complex language. In reducing the worldliness of the text to a structural inertness, Said claimed, contemporary theory tended to lift the activity of the critic out of the world, making it less and less connected to any but the most professional readership.
