Has American literary criticism “gone French”? Affirmative answers to this question have become commonplace. Many literature professors in America credit French scholars such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva with having revitalized their field after the long post-war reign of New Criticism. Citations of these thinkers have steadily increased in American journals of literary criticism since the late 1960s, and a large number of the leading literary scholars in America have drawn heavily upon them in their own work. It is difficult to think of a major critical paradigm in American literary studies today – be it deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, gender and race studies, New Historicism, or post-colonialism – in which the work of French theorists does not figure prominently.

Given the vast influence that many American literary professors attribute to French theory – a vision shared by many of their critics (e.g. Hughes 1989; Paglia 1991; Kimball 1990), who deplore such influence – one might expect to see a great deal of intellectual commonality today between academic literary studies in France and the United States. Yet here a puzzle presents itself: if American literary critics have indeed “gone French,” they seem to have done so in a manner quite different from the French themselves. Interviews I conducted for this study with twenty literature professors in both countries show significant cross-national differences in their prevailing conceptions of what “literary studies” are and ought to be. Literature professors in the United States, for example, consider a much wider range of material to be appropriate for literary studies than do their French counterparts.