in poststructuralist assumptions but the formulating of correctives--in other
words, redress.

The question of how imperial theory might be retailored leads us from An-
dersen's fairy tale to Sartor Resartus. Carlyle, convinced that the worn-out
clothes of Christian theology were causing the vital truths beneath to be ig-
nored or dismissed, sought to fashion from German metaphysics and other fab-
rics a new philosophical garment that would enhance and make accessible the
spiritual dynamic it clothed. If poststructuralism is a "theology" cloaking a
dynamic of literary experience, it is fair to ask whether this dynamic is in some
sense obscured or falsified by this complex of doctrines and what sort of al-
terations would mend the case. These particular "theologians," of course, would
not grant the premises of the question, arguing that the dynamic is merely a
function of the perspectives brought to bear upon it; that the notion of a hu-
manistic center, a textual essence, to be clarified by interpretation--however
polysemous and contradictory the results--vanishes in the infinite regress of
interpretation itself. Another way of saying, perhaps, that clothes not only
make the man but are the man.

If the dynamic, the center, the essence is set up as an invisible Carlylean ab-
solute, a literary Ding an sich, then its deconstruction is a facile matter. But if
it is construed as provisional, empirical, something as heterogeneous and yet as
distinctive as an individual human life, it is less vulnerable to dispersion by
militant anticentrists. Unless J. Alfred Prufrock is dead wrong about his iden-
tity, and really is Prince Hamlet, the "texts" that center upon the two characters
are essentially different and warrant the relative autonomy granted them by a
more empirical, pluralistic criticism than is the prevailing fashion.

The critique of theory that emerged from the symposium was itself empiri-
cal and pluralistic enough to make generalization precarious and thus embod-
ied collectively the antiabsolutist values it affirmed. To be antiabsolutist is not
to be antitheoretical; on the contrary, as a number of these papers make clear,
one must set a theory to catch a theory in the act of overextending its domain.
But there is a crucial difference between theory as a set of constructs that grows
fortuitously out of encountering the peculiar contingencies of peculiar texts
and allows itself to be modified by new bombardments of the same, and theory
embraced from the start as a highly systematized fait accompli to which the
perceived actualities of literary experience must bend.

M. H. Abrams opens the essay collection, as he opened the symposium, by
posing the question "What is a humanistic criticism?" It is a question prompted
not only by a need for definition but also by the need to defend, in a poststruc-

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