ABSTRACT
Gerald Graff realizes that cultural radicalism is not simply a matter of specifically Marxist concepts and theories, but that it works in various contexts, appears in different forms, and has begun to question the common dichotomies in thinking and to subvert and transform the traditional foundations of left cultural criticism. The crisis of "Left" cultural criticism has opened up the radical critique of American culture and society not only to the winds of history, in Fredric Jameson's words, but, at the same time, to a deconstruction and reconstruction of its forms of discourse or counter-discourse. An essay of 1983, "An ideological Map of American Literary Criticism," confirms Graff's notion that "history presents many instances in which the same idea has produced different or opposed social effects in different circumstances." If discourse works as "power," as systematic "exclusion" and "in-corporation," the critic's own "discourse" serves as a "countermemory for the text" and has to function as a counterdiscourse.
