Abstract: Around the 1960s, New Criticism encountered development bottlenecks in the United States, and the philosophical trends originated from the continent European quickly took root and sprouted, driving literary criticism towards critical theory. Different from the ideological sharpness of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School in Germany, the contemporary American critical theory is a transformation of critical perspective of 'post-new criticism', demonstrating an interdisciplinary critical approach. Contemporary American critical theory originated from UC Irvine, and with the joining of important scholars such as Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller, the Irvine School not only inherited the deconstructive tradition of the Yale School, but also led the trend in the direction of critical theory. Although critical theory has gradually moved literary criticism away from 'pure literature', the value of literary research should not be underestimated. At present, the development of critical theory is shifting from literary text to the broad cultural and political space, emphasizing the diversification of theoretical discourse in different fields such as political philosophy, gender identity, media art, ecological environment, and war refugees. This is also the future of critical theory.