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Jens Zimmerman's engaging essay Quo Vadis? Literary Theory Beyond Postmodernism is helpful in a variety of ways. He announces what academia has long understood, but which those outside the academy have yet to acknowledge: that postmodernism no longer characterizes the thought of our period. The period of postmodernism extends, roughly speaking, between 1968-1998.
But its more important contribution is in sketching out the confines of what literary theory ought to look like going forward. Zimmerman asserts, and I agree, that we cannot simply dispense with literary theory, nor should we diminish its contributions in debunking the idea of the autonomous rational subject and the idea that we operate within a neutral objective framework. We are always informed by our prejudices, or implicit 'prior judgments' as Gadamer called them.
The chief deficits of Enlightenment humanism are ones that a future literary theory should rectify.
It will insist that even in the act of close reading (exegesis), it isn't just us and the text. We are also always involved in application even in the act of reading. We are persons who act as well as think, and in both acting and thinking we are motivated by our (ultimate) loves.
A hermeneutic process is involved in our act of knowing (truth), but this truth also has an ethical (goodness) and aesthetic (beauty) dimension. Zimmerman's path forward seems to me important because it recovers the transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness as attributes of God, with which the medieval institution we call the university began, and thereby of true human knowing.
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