ABSTRACT
Echoing William Β. Yeats and Chinua Achebe, in an epoch when things have fallen apart and the center does not hold, there is uncertainty as the old verities of critical scholarship come under attack. Indeed, it is no longer clear what constitutes "critical" scholarship or what we are, or should be, "critical" about. Any putative theoretical coherence lies in tatters, a kind of truth in that lying. A vein of neo-Marxist teleology that always presaged a better future is challenged, but perhaps even more important, the "old" epistemologies and discourses no longer hang together. Language, our most flexible friend, is strained in the process, but perhaps there are also new possibilities—both conceptual and actual—to reconstitute a progressive research agenda.
