After Theory, After Modernity: Reading Humbly

Abstract

In English departments across America, literature has been consumed by theory. Valentine Cunningham outlines the situation this way: ‘A critical Rip Van Winkle waking up now after fifty years of slumber wouldn’t recognize the critical tower of Babel he’d returned to […] Theory is everywhere’ (2002, p. 13). Cunningham points out how modern critics have replaced those readers who enjoy poetry: ‘Literary Theory in fact diminishes the literary, diminishes texts, by reducing them to formulae, to the formulaic, to the status only of the model, of models of literary functions, even of the literary at large, but still only a model’ (2002, p. 122). Literary study has come to be dominated by theorists rather than poets, critics rather than readers.