1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Evolution of Critical Opinion
The formalist methods and close reading practices of New Criticism, which
dominated American critical approaches to literature from the mid 1930s until
1970, remain important in secondary schools and introductory college literature
courses. Among scholars, however, New Criticism has largely been replaced by
approaches derived from the European theories of structuralism and poststruc-
turalism. Critics still ask what a work means, but this question is now accompa-
nied and complicated by others: “What does it mean and to whom?” and “Why
does it mean what it does?” Some readers have complained that these new critical
approaches make literature less important. In terms of maintaining its elite and
separate status as “art,” this objection may be valid. One could argue, however, that
these approaches make literature more relevant to everyday life.
In contrast to New Criticism, structuralism does not focus on literary value,
and it makes no distinction between high and low art forms. Structuralism relies
on linguistic analysis and seeks to uncover the organizing patterns and oppositions
in the structure and meaning of “texts”—a word that replaced traditional terms
such as “poem,” “story,” and “novel” in the 1970s and 1980s to allow comparison
to other representative forms such as billboards and advertisements. Indeed, part
of the innovation of structuralism is that it offers a way to think about culture in
general, not just about literature.
Although poststructuralists criticize structuralism for being simplistic and
ahistorical, they, too, emphasize the relational quality of language. Both move-
ments regard culture as a system of “signs” in which words do not reflect or refer
to an objective world but have meaning only in relation to each other. Both also
focus on the way human thought and behavior are conditioned by social insti-
tutions. The French poststructuralist theorist Michel Foucault has influenced
American literary criticism since 1970. In Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à
l ’âgeclassique (1961; abridged and translated as Madness and Civilization, 1965)
Foucault investigates forms of knowing (which he calls “epistemes”) as expressed
by language, examining how these expressions affect society through the estab-
lishment of hierarchies and controlling institutions such as prisons. Most impor-
tant for literary studies is Foucault’s demonstration of the ways language masks
the socially constructed aspects of important concepts and values. Later critics
use these ideas to explore how markers of identity such as class, race, gender, and
sexuality are socially constructed rather than biologically determined.
The dominant schools of criticism today have arisen from or responded to
poststructuralist concepts; they include deconstruction, reader response, New
Historicism, feminism, African American studies, Asian American studies,
Native American studies, Latino/Latina studies, postcolonialism, and ecocriti-
cism. Writers are aware of and affected by these shifts; John Barth, for example,
integrates commentary on them into his works.
Jacques Derrida introduced deconstruction with his 1966 lecture at Johns
Hopkins University, “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences
humaines” (translated as “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences” in his Writing and Difference, 1970) and three books published in 1967: