On Literary Studies Today: One Perspective

The heady days of structuralism and its offspring, deconstruction, now seem safely behind us. Narratology is still with us, because the study of narrative arrived late in the game, and there is more to be said and there are more revealing applications to be done. But there is a new kid on the block, as we shall see.
Poetry and drama, being "serious" forms of literature, were seriously studied already by the Ancients. Aristotle, Horace, and others had much to say about one or both. But since narrative was traditionally considered to be literally "prosaic" and less dignified, serious work on it is of relatively recent vintage. Since Antiquity, we have had a robust lexicon for detailing the intricacies of poems and plays, and it has been refined and enriched over the centuries. However, despite some fine overtures by the older new criticism, stylistics, and Russian formalism we lacked a precise typology for narrative until Gérard Genette and his contemporaries.
I would not advocate the indiscriminate use of extradiegetic, heterodiegetic, and related terms deployed by Genette. I concur with Susan Lanser's reservations on that score. His use of "metadiegetic" for embedded stories told by characters is particularly unfortunate. However, Genette has called our attention to important considerations, such as metalepsis, and offered new terms for the culture-specific "flash-forward" and "flashback," now dubbed prolepsis and analepsis-terms that work well in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
All approaches from the '60s and '70s have nevertheless been relegated to the back of the bus in the past decade or more in this country, for materialist studies are rapidly becoming the dominant orientation to all genres, periods, and authors. Like the good old Bachillerato Universal Polivalente in Spain, materialist studies are universal and polyvalent. Under this new dispensation, literature is only one discourse among many. It takes no precedence over any other cultural manifestation. Everything is on an equal footing. This is wonderfully leveling. It also allows one to write about everything under the sun-except matters of the heart, soul, or mind, of course; those are immaterial-often using a literary text as a pretext or window on the material machinations surrounding and partially conditioning its production.
A mainline form of cultural studies, materialist studies are complex, with roots in several soils, among them Marxism, materialist philosophy, the French Annales school of history (Braudel et Cie.), and new historicism. They have broadened horizons in certain ways, but they have also trivialized literature in significant ways. I do not mean to be dismissive and, of course, I do not claim to offer a complete description. I would hope to provoke discussion, however, for that is what we pride ourselves on doing in the academy.
In that spirit, I have taken a contrarian stance throughout my career by challenging dominant approaches of the day, initially conservative, "golden-age" thinking (the British School of comedia scholars-in Hispania, in 1974) and in more recent years the liberal, "utopian" wing. I respectfully submit that it is unwise to allow ideologues of either the right or the left to achieve dominance in the intellectual scheme of things. Est modus in rebus.