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ALL CRITICISM OF LITERATURE originates in our personal experiences of individual works, and all criticism is a transformation of those experiences. This seems obvious, yet, implicitly or explicitly, it is the most frequently denied or avoided aspect of the professional study of literature. Indeed, the current crop of critical selfexaminations of literary study yields a rich display of professional avoidance techniques. Professional self-justification seems to have become a pursuit of impersonal contexts or, in one jargon, pretexts for the interpretation of the texts that matter to individual critics. The texts and contexts vary but the pursuit remains constant: justification of intellectual activity that interprets justifies as an object, declares it an autonomous body of works to be studied. This endeavor seems curiously paradoxical, like pulling oneself by one's own bootstraps. Actually, the trick involved is simple, since the category literature is never questioned, it is assumed to exist in itself and only the context or pretext for its interpretation is changed. In the professional recruitment of new contexts no extraliterary categories escape being drafted. Marxist, phenomenological, structuralist and psychoanalytic concepts all find themselves serving one or another methodology, and it is not uncommon (at least in Buffalo) to find students resisting not only a particular critical context but the very endeavor in which their teachers seem so energetically engaged. They seem to suffer a poverty of riches, an array of choices so extensive and sophisticated that in the act of choosing more seems lost than gained, as if the choice of a critical methodology were equivalent to being absorbed and delimited by it. Such absorption seems ambivalently desired, and it is not uncommon (for me) to find students, during doctoral exams, trying somewhat desperately to speak three critical languages at once in a futile attempt to compromise with the apparent demands of professional identities. I often find myself imagining these students in analogy with those schizophrenics whose identities represent the painfully unresolved contradictions disavowed by the members of their families.' Such an extreme analogy fits my own mental style, but I think it also
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