All of which is to say that literary studies cannot effectively enter into dialog with the newer psychologies by simply by adopting them as tools in the way that it has previously adopted psychoanalysis, Marxism, cultural anthropology, and so forth. Why can’t it do this? Because the newer psychologies don’t have concepts directly applicable to literary issues. Psychoanalysis and Marxism did.
Rather, literary studies must rethink its own problems in terms that are commensurate with these newer psychologies but not otherwise beholden to them. This condition is at once minimal and moderately rigorous.
