Introduction

Summary

In the late nineteenth century, Germanic philology initiated the rise of scholarship in the English-speaking university world; in the 1920s, the writings of T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards launched the era of criticism. To risk a third sweeping generalization, we may regard the period between the mid-1960s and the present day as the age of theory. The present volume explores the major critical movements of the period since 1960, also taking account of relevant earlier developments. The critical writings of Todorov, Barthes, Derrida and Iser have more in common with the Classical and Renaissance philosophers and rhetoricians than with the preceding period of British and American criticism. The dominance of continental European philosophy and poetics over the positivist and empirical traditions of British thought has marked a major break in criticism – a sort of geological shift. ‘Feeling’, ‘intuition’, ‘life’, ‘tradition’, ‘organic unity’, ‘sensibility’ are no longer the dominant terms of critical discourse. A dominant humanistic discourse has begun to give way to the languages of formalism, structuralism, and phenomenology. Of course, the new theoretical modes sometimes preserve humanistic perspectives: Wolfgang Iser's reception theory, for example, is founded upon the human experience of the reader. However, the structuralist tradition has proved more resistant to reappropriation by humanisms of one kind or another. It is this theoretical ‘anti-humanism’ which marks a real break with the era of ‘criticism’. These generalizations cannot disguise the fact that resistance to ‘theory’ has been ubiquitous. But if we are to understand these controversies we must remember that ‘theory’ is a term which possesses at least three meanings in this context.