Narratology, Obsolescent Paradigms, and "Scientific" Poetics; or Whatever Happened to PTL?
The crossing of the lines of structuralism and poststructuralism in 1976Â—the one ascendant, the other dependentÂ—can be marked by two events: the publication of the English translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology and the appearance of Vol. I, No. 1 ofPTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature. It was under the embrace and blessing of PTL1 that the new poetics was to flourish and ascend to its confirmation as a science among sciences. In this way the heretofore undisciplined, idiosyncratic, subjective, and naively theoretical study of literature could finally achieve respectability. The call for a "poetics" of literature in the initial volume of PTL was a call for the systemic study of literature and brought with it a highly traditional distinction, proclaimed in the initial essay by Benjamin Hrushovski, editor of the journal: