ABSTRACT
Contemporary theory, following as ever its different agendas, has taught people too much about the importance of ideology and language, about intertextuality, about the formation and reformation of the subject in contemporary culture, and about literary study's own situatedness for a new formalism to be possible or desirable. Rather, criticism must discover its working practices, its interpretative strategies and purpose, its conception of its object of study, its academic and cultural role, by way of such theory. These strategies and intentions will be focused in the work of literary criticism; at best in the consciously theoretical and necessarily dialogic analysis of literary texts. In author's view, the function of literary theory is to explain and generalize both literary discourse and critical practice, making strange what has become naturalized and taken for granted. Criticism had always been theoretical, always dependent on general, informing ideas about the literary and about literary value and critical practice, always grounded in aesthetic and cultural ideologies.
