No, no, it goes all the way back to the dawn of writing-systems. All the precapitalist cultures have sophisticated systems of literary interpretation -- some mythological, others performative, etc. The invention of market-friendly literary criticism, a.k.a. the theory-market, was of course to destroy, commodify or enserf all that cultural knowledge.
> The minting of literary Ph.D.'s since the
> fifties probably has more to do with taking a sizable portion of the
> intelligentia and making them politically useless than with anything else.
The average number of literature Ph.D.s per year is around 1,500. That ain't much. The real hegemony is in the advertising/culture-industry nexus. In terms of cultural capital, we litcritters are regarded anked by US society as life-forms somewhere between protozoa and liver parasites.
Damn, I can't believe I'm *defending* a profession which has refused to give someone like me even the most measly teaching job for five years ("market McCarthyism"). What was I thinking... Must be that summer sun.
-- DRR