Conclusion: FOTA

Abstract

In working on this book and developing a better appreciation of literary academics’ low morale and their dissatisfactions with “business as usual,” I have often had occasion to ponder a question: If the dominant paradigm in literary analysis is weak, if it is manifestly vulnerable on many fronts, if it has failed in providing us all that we believed it promised, how does it persist? That is, despite sagging morale and genres of cruelly whetted polemics (e.g., contributors to Patai and Corral 2005a), recantations (e.g., Lentricchia 1996; Evans 2005), and howls of black despair (e.g., contributors to Mitchell 2004), a serious, radical alternative to the orthodoxies of the liberationist establishment has not materialized (for all of the irony, I agree with Joseph Carroll [1995] that “establishment” is now the appropriate word; or perhaps “hegemony” is better, see Hilfer 2003).

So devastating in theory has been the epistemological critique of poststructuralism that one wonders how the movement has survived as A as it has.

(Frederick Crews 2006, 299; italics in original)