On literary theory--before and after

Some would have you believe that the days of contemporary literary theory are dead and gone, done for, kaput, irrational, dysfunctional, irrelevant, and unreadable. Yet, I would suggest that although the heyday of deconstruction is over, it left a lasting and enduring mark on the literary scene, and that no literary criticism can be done today without taking all of that--Saussure, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault--in. These philosophers and theorists asked hard questions about the way language structures itself, creating relationships among/between words, socially constructed categories, and sign, signifier and the signified. After theorists argued their cases, literary criticism lost its innocence and could never go back to the grand old days of the nineteenth century when writers were writers and a reader could really know what a text meant by just reading it. There is definitely a before and after Derrida whose works question and put into doubt all practices of reading, writing, and criticism. One might question the nature of objective/subjective dialectics, or the impossibility of even defining deconstruction, but the text as sacred object where intentionality and literal meaning may have resided is gone forever, never to return to its pristine state of innocence where one could (pre)determine meanings and state correct answers. The idea that great texts were written and read by great men is an idea that died long ago, slung onto the ash heap of nineteenth-century historical discourse. The fact that texts betray themselves (rather easily) has lead some to wonder if deconstructionism is just another name for a nihilist relativism by which any text can mean anything, an idea which deconstruction has always rejected because texts do mean. They just might not mean what you always thought they meant. The idea that a text's subversive nature lies buried within itself seems contradictory, but the more a text tries to mean one thing, it always ends up meaning something else. Semiotics and Structuralism have given way to new fields in cultural studies, queer theory, gender theory, feminism, post-colonial theory, and post-structuralism. Of course, no literary theory is useful unless it helps unveil the mysteries of the text. The push-back against theory which occurred in the nineties functioned to both redefine what theory does--help with textual analysis--and what theory is--a set of operating parameters that define the pragmatic boundaries of what theory might do. Essentially, the push-back against deconstruction and literary theory only served to fracture deconstruction into a dozen other kinds of theory, but what has been obvious since this rejection of theory is that the sweet old days of literal textual reading were forever over. The irony of the post-Cold war period, post-Soviet Union, changes the way anything might be read. Those who would nostalgically yearn for a Golden Age author-text criticism, wallowing in the squalid details of any author's life in order to interpret the work of art as (auto)biography, have had a difficult time rebuilding their fallen empire of gossip, anecdotes, lies, pseudepigrapha, apocrypha, palimpsests, and twice-told tales of love, hate, and shame. The work of art, with or without its creator, author, exists independently of intention or authorial objectives. The text always exists outside of its anecdotal marginalia, for good or bad, and readers, critics, and interpreters may or may not know what the author had in mind, nor does it matter. The good old days are just gone, and we can no longer rely on biography and third-hand gossip to help us understand what a text is doing at any given moment, and let's not open the can worms regarding the changes in meaning a text undergoes with the passage of time. That, as they say, is another story.