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See also Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp (in W. J. T. Mitchell, Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985): “Our arguments from the start have taken the form of showing that whatever positions people think they hold on language, interpretation, and belief, in practice they are all pragmatists. They all think language is intentional, and they all think their beliefs are true” (145, “Reply to Rorty”).
While courses on literary theory are de rigeur for any university or college which hopes to be taken seriously, theory is very largely confined to a subject of study on such courses, and is seldom taken consistently into a practice of critical reading over a broad range. A survey of the syllabi of many English and United States universities will show that ‘theory’, anti-foundationalist or otherwise, has little purchase in practical terms. Most critical readings are resolutely intentionalist, confident of the power of language to transcend differences of context, changes in usage, and the idiosyncracies of users, and steady in pursuit of objective truths. The preferred mode in most critical reading courses is, still, at this remove from Richards, a kind of modified practical criticism with bits and pieces of bio-detail, historical or post-colonial or cultural studies ‘hard fact’ and glossed secondary readings mixed in to leaven the lump. A dash of upgraded New Criticism, where a formally structured model of close reading is felt to be necessary, completes the mix.