Contenu du sommaire : La critique littéraire aux Etats-Unis.

Since the demise of the New Criticism in the sixties, literary theory has become a central and highly controversial issue in the American academy. European and especially French thinkers, from Derrida to Kristeva, have played a major part in the debates that have been raging over the function and meaning of literature, and American criticism has certainly gained from their questioning of traditional assumptions. It remains to be seen, however, what use has been made of the imported theories and methodologies, and whether American criticism has achieved any insights of its own.

Wordsworth's poem, « A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal » (1799), has become a standard text for contending theories of interpretation in the United States, from the New Critics and their opponents onward through the Deconstructionists to the New Pragmatists. This paper is an attempt to trace the development of theoretical issues at stake behind this still ongoing debate. In particular, it will be shown that there is at work in contemporary American Criticism a process of reduction — from the « text itself » to the intertext, and finally to the context — that results in rendering the concept of textuality almost meaningless.

This study proposes to evaluate the efficacy of feminist criticism since it established its original programme in resistance to a critical and canonical tradition ruled by phallic « universals ». Whilst my reading recognizes the incisiveness of the new tools, especially in the concept of « gender », it regrets the loss of critical power resulting from a textual practice based around what has to appear as a reactionary, reflectionist and subjectivist aesthetics. Relying on a set of myths (feminist Fables, mother-theories, mother-texts), it inverts, therefore fails to subvert, the fundamental tropes of patriarchal discourse.

Between gynocriticism and the Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation of feminity the divide seems difficult to bridge. Yet some conceptual haze has obscured the issue. While gynocriticism has mapped a new literary landscape for women, psychoanalytic criticism is probing textual traces. The invention of a new reading style combining theory and autobiography stems from an intimate inquiry into what a woman wants.

This paper examines some of the uses and abuses of contextualist practices derived from New Historicist procedures. It uses the treatment of Henry James as a touchstone for the critical models advertised by A Cultural History of the American Novel : Henry James to William Faulkner (David Minter, 1994), and assesses other recent attempts at historicizing the myth of James and contextualizing him as a disturbing figure of heterogeneity.