Unlike the work of Derrida and Barthes, Foucault's work is difficult for writers inured to New Criticism . Deconstruction and semiotics, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, are formalist enterprises, ones carried out comfortably without ever investigating the context. Foucault, on the contrary, rejects the haven of the text, literary or otherwise, on the grounds that the disciplines that have developed in the course of the past two centuries around such texts are themselves part of the problem that needs to be analyzed. For Foucault, disciplines such as language are not neutral tools or containers serving the pursuit of truth without interference. Yet in both cases the traditional apparatus of textuality is affirmed and the sanctity of the kinds of things done under the rubric of literary criticism is reinforced.
Foucauldian criticism looks different from earlier forms of criticism.
For better or worse, literary and nonliterary texts are placed on the same plane, subjected to the same analytic tools, and interrogated in relation to the same contextual landscapes. However, to give the impression of a monolithic Foucauldian strategy with regard to literary texts would seriously distort the picture. It is more than likely that Foucault's impact on literary criticism will take shape as a renewed form of Marxist interpretation, perhaps along lines recently developed by New Historicism . Foucault shares with the latter group an aversion to theory, in his case involving the paradox that he was read, in the United States at least, primarily as a theorist. Foucault's hostility to theory leads to several difficulties for those who attempt to practice his strategies of reading.