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This age of critical discourse is the best of times or it is the worst of times, depending on one's point of view; but there is no denying that it is a very diverse and lively time. Never have the presuppositions and procedures of literary criticism been put so drastically into question, and never have we been presented with such radical alternatives for conceiving and making sense of literary texts. Among the competing theories of the last few decades we find reader-response criticism (itself divisible into a variety of subspedes), reception criticism, anxiety-of-influence critidsm, structuralist criticism, semiotic criticism and — most ominous to many traditional ears — deconstructive criticism. It was not many years ago that announcements of jobs for professors of literature began to be supplemented by requests for professors of literary criticism. Now we find increasing requests for professors of the theory of criticism — professors, that is, whose profession is metacriticism.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-10335-5_3

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