ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a personal retrospective on the tumultuous period in literary studies from the 1960s through the present, the time of my involvement as university student, professor, and scholar specializing in the history of literary and cultural criticism and theory. It compares and contrasts the three dominant critical paradigms of this period, namely, New Criticism, poststructuralism, and cultural studies, as a way to portray and assess the broad intellectual and cultural struggles of the times. It is worth recalling that until the late 1970s and mid-1980s, depending on where you were located, graduate students could not specialize in criticism and theory. It would have been considered both odd as well as highly risky to study theory as a primary or secondary area of research and scholarship. The chapter hopes that anyone examining the anthology concludes that there is no going back to some preor nontheoretical literary study.
