It was sometime in the 1980s, I think, that a basic transformation of the aims of literary criticism was complete. Not the spread of political themes and identity preoccupations, which struck outsiders and off-campus critics like William Bennett, a former secretary of education turned radio host, as the obvious change, but a deeper adjustment in the basic conception of what criticism does. It was, namely, the shift from criticism-as-explanation to criticism-as-performance. Instead of thinking of scholarship as the explication of the object–what a poem means or a painting represents–humanists cast criticism as an interpretative act, an analytical eye in process.
The old model of the critic as secondary, derivative, even parasitical gave way to the critic as creative and adventuresome. Wlad Godzich’s introduction to the second edition of Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight (1983) nicely caught the mood in its title: “Caution! Reader at Work!” People spoke of “doing a reading,” applying a theory, taking an approach, and they regarded the principle of fidelity to the object as tyranny. In a 1973 essay in New Literary History titled “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis,” Geoffrey H. Hartman chastised the traditional critic for being “methodologically humble” by “subduing himself to commentary on work or writer”; then he declared, “We have entered an era that can challenge even the priority of literary to literary-critical texts.” A writer has a persona, he stated. “Should the interpreter not have personae?”
Older modes of criticism were a species of performance as well. But they claimed validity to the extent to which the object they regarded gave up to them its mystery. The result, the clarified meaning of the work, counted more than the execution that yielded it. By the late 1980s, though, the question “What does it mean?” lost out to “How can we read it?” The interpretation didn’t have to be right. It had to be nimble.