Like most other disciplines, literary criticism swings back and forth between a desire to do small-scale jobs well and carefully and a desire to paint the great big picture. At the moment it is at the latter pole, and is trying to be abstract, general, and theoretical. This has resulted in literary critics taking more of an interest in philosophy, and philosophers returning the compliment. This exchange has been useful to both groups. I think, however, that there is a danger that literary critics seeking help from philosophy may take philosophy a bit too seriously. They will do this if they think of philosophers as supplying “theories of meaning” or “theories of the nature of interpretation,” as if “philosophical research” into such topics had recently yielded interesting new “results.”

Philosophy too swings back and forth between a self-image modeled on that of Kuhnian “normal science,” in which small-scale problems get definitively solved one at a time, and a self-image modeled on that of Kuhnian “revolutionary science,” in which all the old philosophical problems are swept away as pseudoproblems and philosophers busy themselves redescribing the phenomena in a new vocabulary. The field presently called “literary theory” has profited primarily from the latter sort of philosophy (which has lately been fashionable in France and Germany). Unfortunately, however, it has often tried to describe itself as if it were profiting from philosophy of the former sort. It has employed the scientistic rhetoric characteristic of the early period of analytic philosophy.