ABSTRACT
John Ellis is a Germanist who has published books on Kleist, Schiller, and the German Novelle, as well as an earlier theoretical study, The Theory of Literary Criticism (1974). The title of the latter work evokes Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949), and is organized in the same way, around a series of central issues, though Ellis treats fewer topics at greater length. Both, incidentally, are worth comparing to the recently published collective volume Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (University of Chicago Press, 1990). All three attempt to lay out the basic issues of literary theory and to summarize recent debate on them. There the resemblance ends, for the Critical Terms volume represents a compendium of all that Ellis dislikes about contemporary ‘theory’, which he does not believe is theory at all. The Preface to Against Deconstruction alludes to the coming into dominance of deconstruction ‘during the last fifteen years’, exactly the period since his own theoretical book. We can sense in the new work some of Ellis’s frustration with what he calls the ‘degeneration’ of discussion on many of the issues he and others had already clarified.
