Criticism limited : singularities and pluralities of constraint

Abstract

This article reviews some of the key constraints on critical discourse today, when theory is supposedly on the wane. Many of those constraints are longstanding, but were undone with notable deliberation in certain theoretical texts, particularly those associated with deconstruction. That, at least, is what certain narratives of criticism contend, but what this paper does is to assess a contrary story, examining whether the will-to-transgression and the (counter- )aporetic imagination in certain theoretical texts can be said to have durably altered critical practice. Perhaps too much has been made of the gestures of subversion and radicality, and of the rhetoric of transgression and liminality. However, the conclusion will tend towards the idea that in proffering the possibility of a critical discourse that would be singular (in all senses of that term), certain areas of literary theory have, whatever their disappointments and possible failures, contributed a lasting sense of the possibility and value of singularity in literary criticism. Beyond that, it is argued, there may be limits to criticism that cannot be transgressed even in theory.