In the post-1960s academy what comes to be known as poststructuralist theory radically redefines textuality and liberates critical discourse from the world of the formerly insular text, for, as theory would have it, “there is nothing outside of the text” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 158; emphasis in original). In other words, because “our very relation to ‘reality’ already functions like a text” (Johnson, “Introduction” xiv), textuality is taken to be a structure or condition far exceeding a limited set of hyperrealized linguistic events. The preeminent lines of New Critical reasoning and reasonableness are after the 1960s both greatly assailed and, for the most part, eclipsed by the unruly and amorphous entity known as poststructuralist theory. New Critical programs exert their primary influence on the post-1960s academy as the intuitive center of critical practice or, most openly, in the terms of nostalgia and loss. “Theory in the United States institution of the profession of English,” writes Gayatri Spivak, a paramount player in the ascendancy of deconstruction and poststructuralism in the United States, “is often shorthand for the general critique of humanism undertaken in France in the wake of the Second World War and then, in a double-take, further radicalized in the mid-sixties in the work of the so-called poststructuralists” (“Making” 788). Much more than formal exegesis, theory pursues