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Yes, let's return to the days when teaching literature amounted only to making certain that students followed the plot, caught the Biblical and classical allusions, and underlined (in pink or purple, one hopes) the felicitous phrases.
And then, the instructor stands in front of the adoring students and explains to them (since how would they know if they've never read any theory?) what is really going on.
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How true that is, Epigone. I read literature for twenty years before I returned to university. And all that time, in my deep and untutored ignorance, I actually believed that I was seeing what was going on in the books I read.
What a fool I was.
It was not till I re-enrolled as a student that I discovered how blind I had been. To my great surprise, I learned, among many other things, that Shakespeare's plays were not the powerful presentations of human experience I had thought. No, they actually turned out to be encoded presentations of social repressions and controls. And furthermore, I learned that reading these plays as powerful insights into human reality was merely a trick of propaganda perpetrated on naïve readers by fascist “traditionalists”, whose real motivation was the inculcation of a sense of membership in a cultural elite.
What a lucky escape I had, and all thanks to contemporary literary theory. Without the spectacles of this social theory (and the linguistic theories which supported it) I would still be a blind and naïve reader. So let's hope this rumour of the death of theory is just that, and literature can continue to be saved from such ignorant approaches as mine.
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Mark Allinson