The Current in Criticism: Essays on the Present and Future of Literary Theory

The Current in Criticism is meant to provide the reader with a wide spectrum of current thinking, a sampling of some of the arguments, attitudes, and perspectives, which participate in the swirl of intense speculative energy that is so characteristic of contemporary theory. The editors describe this collection of 14 essays as “a tentative assessment of where we are and where we might be going in literary study, of what is current in criticism and of where the critical current might be tending.”

Clayton Koelb is an associate professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Chicago. Koelb is the author of Thomas Mann’s “Goethe and Tolstoy”: Notes and Sources and The Incredulous Reader: Literature and the Function of Disbelief. He has also published many articles and reviews in journals such as Comparative Literature, Genre, Monatshefte, German Quarterly, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Germanic Review, Modern Language Studies, and PMLA, to name a few.

Virgil L. Lokke is professor emeritus of English at Purdue University. On Fulbright appointments, he has taught at major universities in Norway and Finland, where he received awards for excellence in teaching.