Literary theory after 1960 retained literary specialness while denying the world outside text

Evidence

It was in the 1960s, in any case, that contentions were really sharpened, in the form of a three-way split. The great majority of teachers and critics have continued to function, in both Britain and North America, as if nothing much has changed since T.S. Eliot and the ‘New Criticism’ An enti~ely new kind of literary avant-garde has also arisen, however, on both sides of the Atlantic, which functions now - alongside and in conflict with the conservative majorityunder the insignia not of critic_ism but of theory. … In an accompanying move, ‘Literature’ undergoes both a deflation and an aggrandizement: it becomes, in one sort of reading, just one discourse among other discourses, with its specialness residing simply in the difference of its language; but in a much more radical and now quire pervasive displacement - which asserts that there is really nothing outside language, outside textuality, outside representationeverything becomes, in a sense, ‘Literature’ The bulk of this avant-garde is essentially technicist, much more so than poor old ‘New Criticism’ ever dreamed of being, but alongside this bulk there is also a minoritarian current within the avant-garde. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 232

Categorization

• DEFINE: Ahmad defines theory’s distinguishing move: literature as self-sufficient discourse, the ‘nothing outside the text’ principle that makes everything literary.
• XREF: connects to: Academic theory domesticated 1960s political dissent into textual culture — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 23