Introduction Richard Rorty suggests that American literary criticism since World War II has increasingly compensated for the “professionalization” of philosophy and its withdrawal into purely technical and academic concerns, then contemporary “criticism” is not merely a professional discipline but a larger social phenomenon, supplanting history, philosophy, or religion as the site of cultural and moral pedagogy par excellence. (Rorty, 60-71)The renaissance of “theory” in the American literary academy since the early seventies may, however, suggest a significantly different cultural prospect. The development of highly specialized languages of critical practice, assumptions about the inherent superiority of theory over immediate questions of textual interpretation, the particular combination of the prophetic tone with the desire for scientific rigor–all these point to a substantial change in the cultural role and function of contemporary literary criticism. Less a culturally effective discourse than a specialized set of language games, contemporary criticism may indeed resemble academic philosophy in its most technical modes, appealing to a trained coterie. Harold Bloom stresses the responsibility the teacher of literature now has for a general moral pedagogy: “The teacher of literature now in America, far more than the teacher of history or philosophy or religion, is condemned to teach the presentness of the past, because history, philosophy and religion have withdrawn as agents from the Scene of Instruction” (cited in Rorty, p. 68). We may or may not respond to the plaintive tone of Bloom’s assertion, particularly in this passage, but it identifies a phenomenon both Rorty and Bloom describe in the same general terms. From the outside, it is possible to lament this truncation of the public functions of criticism. Edward Said, whose career straddles both high theory and the popular cultural critical modes, has attacked much of contemporary theory on the grounds of its political ineffectuality. By implicit contrast to the very critics Rorty would identify as the previous generation’s culture heroes (including Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson), Said chides even Marxist critics for their apparent contentment with the discursive contexts of academic institutions. (Said, 158-79) For anyone concerned with the politics of culture, this is certainly a significant charge and needs to be thought through. There are institutional pressures toward insularity and irrelevance. It is safer and more comfortable for an American cultural critic to write about theories of ideology than to analyze the hidden racist agenda of the state and its implications for immediate educational and cultural issues. But Said may be too hasty in assuming that critics such as Paul de Man and Harold Bloom are ineffectual angels, for the college literature classroom is often the register of fundamentally new aesthetic-cultural ideologies. The death of the author; the valorization of jouissance, not pleasure, the text, not the work; the play of mobile signifiers, not the search for determinable meaning: the slogans point to a basic systemic change that touches our discourses of society as well as of art. Such a phenomenon, then, requires at least an intrinsic theoretical critique, rather than a purely sociological diagnosis. Literariness is rev