This collection of essays in and on recent critical theory and its backgrounds attempts to clarify what is probably one of the most complex situations in the history of literary criticism. The classifier of methodologies can look back only with nostalgia at the simplicity of his problems with the limited warfare among New Critics, biographical and historical scholars, neo-humanists, neo-Aristotelians, and old-style Freudians and Marxists. Much more confusing these days are the challenges not only to critical method but to the very assumption that there is an object or language for criticism....