ABSTRACT
Literary criticism is a privileged site for the crossings of literature and philosophy, since philosophically informed approaches to criticism, sometimes called “theory,” have shaped the modern form of the field. This chapter describes methodological debates which have developed over the last half-century, between theoretical forms of critique and their alternatives. It locates early forms of that discourse within the eighteenth-century origins of literary criticism, where the contours of the modern field and its turn toward “postcritique” were pioneered in distinctions between theory and empiricism.
