The editor of CRITICAL INQUIRY welcomed my fast-written response to something in that journal and thought of having my piece paired with the one I was responding to. In the next months others responded or were asked to respond and the result was a booklet, AGAINST THEORY (1983). Some of the critics including Knapp and Michaels mentioned my piece but did not engage it intelligently--misrepresented what I very clearly said. This is an example of people just not able to read because of what they thought they knew. This article was very important to me because it was a great breakthrough. I was writing FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS, for which this piece formed part of the preface. At an MLA party in LA Gerald Graff asked for it at Northwestern. Hayford found from Graff that it was in hand in Evanston and told me that he had suggested that Don Cook of the Howells Edition be an official reader for the press. I sputtered! Cook would not have understood it at all. I said, "Jerry should ask Cleanth Brooks" and I named a couple more respected theorists, maybe including Mitchell from CRITICAL INQUIRY. Hayford scoffed at me. "But it's textual," he said (not having read it). Well, yeah, but it was also more theoretical than Murray Krieger and it was using cognitive psychology, creativity research, and studies of memory. It was pretty much trashed by the New Critical residue of reviewers, but over the years people discovered it. I think I will print here a list of praise I made for the Quarter Century after it was published in 1984. But it was a failure--the textual crowd decided that whatever got printed was what we should read and the theory crowd Deconstructed themselves.
AD FOR THE BOOK VERSION.
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