Arnold made a rather pitiful attempt to revive it, but his attempt was probably instrumental in the establishment of the absurd idea of a Discipline called literary criticism. Frye made a last desperate attempt to salvage that concept, but after a brief splash it seems no one reads his book anymore. People have implicitly given up the attempt to define anything remotely like a Discipline that could be called "The Study of Literature," and no one really takes seriously anymore the idea that there could be a History of Liteerature or a History of Literary Criticism (as distinguished from random commentary chronologically arranged). Rene Wellek apparently clung to the end of his life to the desperate belief that Literary History existed, but his brave attempt in the several volumes of History of Criticism to embody that vain hope are interesting chronological commentaries but it would be absurd to call them a History in any useful sense.
So now the concept of a shared body of texts which all participants in a given "conversation" (of whatever scope, seriousness, or pretensions) is laughable. No one seriously believes that. Individuals in particular conversational contexts (e-mail list, curriculum planning committee, Congressional Hearing, the pages of the NYRB) will attempt to browbeat other participants into accepting the brow-beater's personal reading as incumbent on all to share, but this is an obvious schtick; no one need be cowed by such arrogance. Each of us has our own list of "Essential Reading," but any attempt to impose tht list on others is merely evidence of that person's personal arrogance and contempt for others.
Carrol
Anyone who has not read Wellek, Frye, & Tamas is of course not competent to engage in this discussion.