One could define postmodern literary theory very loosely as theory that rebels against formalism—especially the New Criticism, with its roots in the aesthetics of Modernism and French Symbolism. One might see, then, already with Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, a movement away from the aestheticism of the New Critics.⁷⁰ Yet Frye is frankly Aristotelian (as he states in his Preface) and his theoretical self-understanding certainly does not take a "postmodern" turn. Nor are social criticism and eclecticism, as alternatives to New Criticism, radical alternatives that venture beyond modernity. They only modify the extremes of formalist-rhetorical criticism.

The Geneva critics, however, do find in phenomenology the philosophical basis for a standpoint that is not formalist, nor simply eclectic, but genuinely moves beyond the objectivist assumptions of most modern criticism.

Sarah Lawall's excellent survey Critics of Consciousness gives an account of these critics and of a single American critic, J. Hillis Miller.⁷¹ Miller is now at Yale with Geoffrey Hartmann, Paul de Man, and others, in a group which well may prove a seminal source of postmodern literary criticism and theory. The influence of Derrida is strong in this group, and has been felt already in Diacritics and New Literary History, as well as in Hillis Miller's review of Joseph Riddel's The Inverted Bell⁷² Riddel himself should be mentioned in this context, for his book, devoted principally to the "counterpoetics" of William Carlos Williams, is a major effort in postmodern theory of literature. Riddel attempts to apply premises from Derrida and Heidegger to Paterson, which Williams' rebellion against literary and critical Modernism makes an ideal case study in postmodern aesthetics.

An independent and brilliant literary theorist of "post-modern literature" is Ihab Hassan, whose Dismemberment of Orpheus⁷³ and Paracriticisms are major documents in articulating the theory of postmodernism. Hassan's Orpheus book finds the breakdown of the muse as seen in the literature of silence, absurdity, ambiguity, the void, and determined non-literariness as central to postmodernism. He devotes chapters to de Sade, Hemingway, Kafka, Genet, and Beckett. In Paracriticisms, Hassan seeks a gnostic reconciliation of scientific Utopian thinking with technophobic clinging to arcadia, bringing into the realm of "postmodernism" the literature of vision and the literature of imaginative science fiction. Hassan's openness to paraliterary forms should force the "English teachers" of America to stretch their categories—and it exerts the same pressure on postmodern theorists who might prefer to stick with Williams.

Three journals in particular take a special interest in exploring literary postmodernism: Diacritics, New Literary History, and boundary 2. Among the major contributions of these magazines has been an opening of American thinking to European modes of criticism. In particular, several valuable articles on the literary postmodern appeared in Volume 1 of boundary 2 (1972-73): David Antin's "Modernism and Postmodernism"; Charles Altieri's "From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern Poetics"; and William V. Spanos' "The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination." A special issue of New Literary History was also devoted to postmodernism.⁷⁴ A recent review of Nathan Scott's Three Modern Moralists takes up the problem of a postmodern ethics.⁷⁵ This is simply a random listing with many omissions.

William V. Spanos has taken up the project of developing a "postmodern hermeneutics" based on Heidegger's Being and Time. As the title of his forthcoming book, Icon and Time,⁷⁶ indicates, Spanos sees a basic dichotomy between the spatialization of being as represented in icons and images (in modernism) and the temporalization of being-in-the-world (in Being and Time). According to Spanos, the New Critics took their formalist aesthetics from the spatialized thinking of French Symbolism, and its English versions in Eliot, Yeats, and Pound. On the other hand, Heidegger's Being and Time introduces a new and radically temporal ontology, a new definition of being in terms of time, care, anxiety, and guilt, which both defines the horizon of postmodern literature and conditions post-modern literary theory. The ramifications of this position are considerable, for they challenge the basic logocentrism and spatialized character of modernity and not just of modernism. Although Icon and Time has not yet appeared, major portions of it may be found in previous issues of boundary 2, as well as in this present issue.

Finally, Edward W. Said's major recent work, Beginnings, represents an impressive articulation of French poststructuralist thought in Said's own formulation and application to literary works and literary history.⁷⁷ To the image of a center or an "origin" Said opposes the image of a beginning that has no "origin" but represents a combination of historical situation and human intention. Whereas the implicit ontology of structuralist thinking assumed a balanced and static structure, Said follows Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida in denying the center, the logos. Centers are finite and temporal—nomadic centers of meaning which will eventually change; they were not made eternally at some point of origin in creation. Thus, a text is "produced," is begun, in the intention of a human agent; its origin is a "beginning" by a person in a situation. Again the radically temporal and finite character of a beginning contrasts with the idea of a fixed, metaphysical origin-point, a logos. Said specifically contrasts his position with that of Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism, where Platonism and tonality-centeredness contrast with his, Said's, decentered emphasis on the constructed and finite character of human knowledge and especially human fictions. In doing so, he suggests a standpoint beyond the metaphysics and the poetics of modernism.

Said's book has important hermeneutical implications. He suggests an image of the interpreter of the text that makes him not the knower of an "origin"-truth but a constructor, like the original writer of the text, of a meaning. Meaning is constructed, not given to man. Interpretation has analogies in the performance of an actor on the stage, who has a humanly created text and also a theater in which he must again bring that meaning into being. Enter man the interpreter, constructor, performer, the being with intentions and methods of bringing those intentions to fulfillment.

This survey has been necessarily impressionistic rather than systematic, but it may give some idea of the variety of thought that goes under the heading of postmodern literary theory. Much has been left out—for instance, the contemporary German theorists, like Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauß, and Rainer Warning, and many contemporary American theorists, such as Fish and Holland, who make a frontal attack on the tradition of formalism and philological objectivity in the name of reader response or speech act theory. But these few citations outline at least some dimensions of postmodern literary theory.

III. POSTMODERNITY AND HERMENEUTICS

Postmodernity affects hermeneutics in many ways. It suggests that a one-dimensional definition of interpretation built around a perspectival model will not do. It suggests that a definition of hermeneutics in terms of establishing the "correct" interpretation of texts is unduly narrow and one-dimensional in setting a single interpretive standard and reference-point. It opens up new models of the interpreter's mediation. And most important, postmodernity raises the question of a transition and transformation so radical as to change the fundamental views of language, history, truth, time, and matter—so radical that "understanding" become a quite different process. It raises the possibility, in other words, of a "new hermeneutics."