Reading After Theory

* Asks what literary criticism should do in the post--theory era. * Articulates the case for a theoretically aware but textually centred literary studies. * Controversial in its privileging of texts over readings and in its insistence on the rehumanisation of literary studies. Valentine Cunningham's controversial manifesto asks what will and should happen to reading in the post-theory era. His account examines the spread of literary theory from the 1960s, when it was considered highly contentious, to the present time, when theoretical approaches are taken for granted across a range of disciplines. Whilst acknowledging the necessity of theory for reading and recognising the good it has done, he strongly criticises it for encouraging bad reading, and for diminishing the richness, scope and human connection of texts. Cunningham argues that theory has made texts secondary to questions of ideology, oppressions and resistance (important though they are) and proposes that what is needed in order to rescue literary studies is a return to close and "tactful" reading. His manifesto insists on the primacy of texts over all theorising about them, and on the restoration of the human to literary studies. Valentine Cunningham's controversial manifesto asks what will and should happen to reading in the post-theory era.