From history to catalog

In their introduction to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism ,
Luis Menand and Lawrence Rainey comment on the increasing speed in the changeover of critical fashion fads:

“as deconstructionis assimilated to various currents of feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxistcriticism, the New Historicism absorbs and supersedes all its predecessors,so providing a comprehensive framework in which to situate anarrative of New Criticisms rise and fall. Yet such an account wouldslight the sheer velocity that has marked these developments and theunforeseen consequences which have followed. (One can measure thespeed of change by Jonathan Cullers books: his classic presentation of Structuralist Poetics appeared in 1975; his subsequent book, On Deconstruction ,was published in 1982; yet it was in the same year that StephenGreenblatt was coining the term New Historicism.)”

This velocity makes a history of literary criticism difficult to write:

“The increasing rapiditywith which one critical mode has yielded to another has tended todelegitimise the developmental narrative of ideas as an adequate way ofaccounting for critical change; unfolding intellectual debate is replaced bya chronicle that merely registers a succession of discrete and ultimatelyincommensurable events. The history of criticism, both as an intellectualconcept and as a genre, gives way to the interim report that increasinglyreads like a chronicle of haute couture, in which a catalogue of vertiginouschanges reveals only the benumbing uniformity of factitious novelty. Weare no longer confident that changes in criticism or literary theory exhibitthe kind of developmental coherence once postulated in the notion of ahistory of literary criticism; such a purely internalist account of literarytheory, while giving due attention to the philosophical background thathas informed the evolution of theoretical protocols, risks losing sight ofwhy such protocols have been deemed necessary at all” (2).