ABSTRACT
It is interesting to compare this new collection of twenty-five essays, all devoted to exploring the possible future for literary studies, with Ralph Cohen’s previously edited collection of essays New Directions in Literary History (1974). Rereading that former collection now we observe academic criticism coming to terms with an uncertain future. Something has died, or is threatening to die, namely critical formalism, and what will come to take its place is hardly agreed upon by the various contributors. Fifteen years on and we have, of course, a much better sense of what was occurring. In that intervening period we have witnessed the rise of deconstruction, a rejection of the formalistic principles of the monadic text, a number of ‘deaths’ (of the author, of traditional historicism, of the concept of ‘literal’ meaning). Most importantly of all we may well feel, comparing our own current state of critical thinking to that apparently fastreceding horizon, that the ‘innocence of reading’, still observable in a number of the contributions to that earlier collection, has ‘died’. We have indeed lived through a period in which ‘humanism’ itself has supposedly been buried. In an environment where the very idea of ‘presence’ and thus ‘meaning’ has been not so much questioned as subjected to a wholesale dismantling (de-construction), ‘humanistic studies’ has come to seem a rather quaint and old-fashioned appellation, totally insufficient as a descriptive term for our present obsessions and vertiginous perspectives. To read through the essays here, however, is to realize that much more has been going on in the state of criticism than this dismantling of traditional humanistic assumptions and foundations. The number and the strength of ‘feminist’ contributions are one signal that criticism has not become completely obsessed with tracing the linguistic aporia. The attention to the political implications along with the social and racial functions of literary studies is another. Indeed, as Ralph Cohen explains in his excellent introduction, even the surviving deconstructors are beginning to push beyond the scenes of writing, differance, the linguistic trace, and the abysmal etymon, into a space as much cultural as rhetorical. One
of the four divisions Cohen elaborates in order to encompass the disparate tendencies in the essays as a whole is entitled ‘lncorporating deconstructive practices, abandoning deconstructive ends’. Cohen explains: There can be no doubt that the essays by Hillis Miller and Geoffrey Hartman and Jonathan Culler describe deconstructive theory in decline.’
