Abstract

Broadly conceived, this project constitutes a genealogy of the discipline of literary criticism in the United States over the last 20 years. Specifically, it deals with the reception of the literary and philosophical manifestations of "postmodernism" within literature departments--especially the theoretical work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, the literary and critical work of the "Language" poets, and Thomas Pynchon's postmodern opus Gravity's Rainbow. ;I argue that the recent "triumph of theory" in literary criticism leaves literary critics increasingly hungry for paradigms--hungry for new methods or strategies for reading texts, for producing critical analyses. However, I argue that the rigidifying search for a method implicit in the theory industry co-opts much of the potential force of postmodern discourses by covering over the important methodological and institutional questions that these discourses raise. Rather than concerning itself with Derrida's and Foucault's foundational questions , the theory industry is interested in pragmatic reading methods, in theories as instruments or commodities. Through this reduction, Derrida's texts are transformed into "deconstructive criticism" and Foucault's into the basis for "new historicism." ;In addition, I argue that criticism likewise reduces the complexities of Gravity's Rainbow and "Language" poetry by thematizing these postmodern discourses in terms of a pluralism of meaning. I argue that to talk of a pluralism of meaning is to remain always within the discourse of ends. To account for the non-existence of an end as the multiplicity of a many ends is always to account for difference in terms of the ultimate possibility of sameness. ;I argue, in short, that postmodern theory's powerful discursive critiques have not had a concomitant institutional effect on the practice and the discipline of literary criticism; in other words, criticism's self-conscious questioning of literary texts has yet to extend to a questioning of its own practice