ABSTRACT
In his 1986 Presidential Address to the Modern Language Association, J. Hillis Miller noted with some alarm a recent and pervasive transformation of literary studies:
As everyone knows, literary study in the past few years has undergone a sudden, almost universal turn away from theory in the sense of an orientation toward language as such and has made a corresponding turn toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context, the material base…conditions of production, technology, distribution, and consumption.
