Reading After Theory

Valentine Cunningham's controversial manifesto asks what will and should happen to reading in the post-theory era.

Valentine Cunningham's controversial manifesto asks what will and should happen to reading in the post-theory era.

Library Journal

For the well-educated contemporary reader, the issue of approaching a text no matter how casually is shadowed by the influences cast on its apprehension by multiple literary theories that have become embedded in our shared intellectual landscape. We may not agree with this or that theory or even be conscious of its prevalence in our literary lives, yet our reading is done in a world where theory comes first and the texts we now take up come after them. This publisher's "Manifestos" series seeks to offer educated but general readers chewy presentations of contemporary ideas, and Cunningham (English language and literature, Oxford) is stellar in his honing to that theme. He traces modern English-language literary criticism back to Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1783) and then goes as far afield as Roland Barthes's explication of mapping, that 20th-century French theorist having "discovered" his symbolic surroundings in Japan. How does one read after Freud? Was Freud doing anything, really, except offering literary theory as a means of disclosing himself? This book is fun, involving, and inviting as both a social book-discussion subject and an important text that graduate students and literary specialists need to consider. Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is also Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany. His previous publications include British Writers of the Thirties (1988), Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (1975) and In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts and History (Blackwell, 1993). He is the editor of The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Blackwell, 2000).