The Future of literary theory /

These two new books on the future of literary theory are very different. Literary Theory's Future(s) is a follow-up volume to an earlier collection of essays, Tracing Literary Theory, ed. by Joseph Natoli (CH, Apr '88). It is an uneven volume. Of its eight essays, this reviewer liked most those by Richard Barney on Paul de Man and by David Gorman on "The Worldly Text." The opening essay, on Lacan, is concerned not so much with assessing the rich future of Lacanian studies as with settling polemical accounts with the past. The polemos or struggle of serious thought to define itself is the task of literary theory in the future; mere polemic is something else entirely. Here, indeed, the very struggle between polemos and polemic defines the dilemma that literary theory faces now and in the coming years. The other essays in this collection are, in effect, very interesting and highly competent annotated bibliographies. On the other hand, The Future of Literary Theory, ed. by Ralph Cohen, offers valuable, interesting, and often brilliantly original assessments of the impact of literary theory on a broad range of cultural studies. Although a few of its 22 essays dismiss deconstruction without having come to terms with its implications, most of the essays think seriously about the future of aesthetics, historiography, feminism, and cultural theory in a postdeconstructive milieu. Particularly notable are the essays by Hayden White, Geoffrey Hartman, Hillis Miller, Gerald Graff, Jonathan Culler, Gregory Ulmer, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The essay by Henry Louis Gates Jr., on theory and black studies, is a stunning tour de force. This distinguished volume not only anticipates the future of literary theory, it is helping to create that future. Of the two, this is the one recommended for graduate, undergraduate, community college, and public libraries. -N. Lukacher, University of Illinois at Chicago