ABSTRACT
It’s always rather surprising what one can do with that strange and amorphous subject often called ‘critical-or literary-theory’: dismiss all scholarship produced before 1970, declare that history exists no more, believe that one can save the world, have crusty old dons declare that one is a terrorist threatening the values of Western civilization by launching an assault on those sacred temples of post-Enlightenment religion, man and reason. Alternatively, one can follow the sane and pragmatic path of selecting those bits of literary theory which don’t actually threaten too much and carry on much as before with a beefed-up jargon hoard.
