American Literary Theory and Philosophical Exceptionalism

Abstract

This essay argues that literary theory can no longer afford to adopt an exceptionalist view of its own disciplinary identity and relation to the Western tradition. To this end, it outlines a conceptual framework that distinguishes between competing tendencies within the Western tradition represented by the terms metaphysics and ontology. The implications of this distinction for literary theory are that the most important sources of the latter's disciplinary identity are neither the linguistics-based movement of French structuralism, as the term poststructuralism implies, nor a "modernity" that has been superseded, as the term postmodernism implies, but rather a modernist tradition of aesthetics shaped by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German romanticism and idealism.