Our hermeneutic models into question: French Theory in/and American Poetry

In the field of English studies, the hermeneutic model of the 20th century inherited from post-structuralism and the French theory steered by intellectuals such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault or Jean Baudrillard seems to have disappeared for the benefit of a return to historicism, or on the contrary, has contributed to the development of cultural studies. This has entailed a taxonomy that challenges the Aristotelian notion of poetics and of genre. However gradual, the evolution in humanities has been radical, most especially in literary criticism, and has had numerous consequences on the very nature of what we now identify as “literature,” as “text,” and on the way we approach and read this/these new object/s. In such a context, it would be interesting to study what structuralism and post-structuralism can still bring to literature, and more particularly what close reading and French theory can still bring to American poetry, rather than what literature and poetry