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From the issue dated December 16, 2005
The Fragmentation of Literary Theory
It has held sway in the humanities for nearly four decades, surviving even the great
culture wars. But it is being used in surprising ways.
By JENNIFER HOWARD
Either literary theory is dead, or it's invincible. It all depends on who's talking. When
Jacques Derrida died last year, The New York Times declared the end of the era of "big
ideas." In April 2003, the Times had run an article about a University of Chicago
symposium on the state of theory headlined "The Latest Theory Is Theory Doesn't
Matter." More recently, a November 17 essay in the online magazine Slate mourned "The
Death of Literary Theory."
Others say that theory has never been more perniciously alive. These critics persist in
arguing that it is no longer possible to study literature for its own sake.
Just this summer, Columbia University Press published Theory's Empire: An Anthology
of Dissent. The volume collects 30 years' worth of contrarian arguments with theory —
make that Theory with a capital T — and takes as its premise the notion that "the rhetoric
of Theory has been successful in gaining the moral and political high ground, and those
who question it do so at their peril."
To find out what's happening in theory these days, over the past few months The
Chronicle reviewed syllabi from some 20 colleges and universities with prominent
English and literature departments and talked with a score of professors who teach
literary theory. Theory, those reports make clear, is far from dead. But neither is it a
unified kingdom. Theory today is a loose federation of states with permeable boundaries,
no universally recognized constitution, and not much in the way of a lingua franca. It
looks less like a superpower, in other words, and more like the fractious and everexpanding European Union.
Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University and a contributor to Theory's
Empire, describes the current situation as "a free-for-all. Theory has no material
coherence, only an attitude. That is, if you claim to be a theorist, you say little about what
your interests and materials are, only how you approach them," he wrote in an e-mail
message. "I just checked the latest issue of Critical Inquiry and spotted articles touching
upon homeland security, the American toy industry, microcinematography, and Wired
magazine. Anything, it seems, is fair game for theorization.
"I think that the 60s theorists would have considered much of this application unserious,"
he continues, "but times have changed, and people are bored by a reading of a paragraph
in [Heidegger's] Being and Time."
1968 and All That
Literary theory of one sort or another goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. But
it has had a particularly busy hundred years or so. (See timeline.)
If contemporary literary theory had a British Invasion moment (or, perhaps, a French
Invasion), it took place in 1966 at the Johns Hopkins University. At a conference there on
"The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," what has come to be known as
Theory crashed onto American shores. Derrida presented a paper, "Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," that marked the beginning of
deconstruction — "if deconstruction can be said to have a clear beginning," according to
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
In that context, theory is the impenetrable postmodernist stuff that has given many a
canon-loving student the heebie-jeebies since the French critic Roland Barthes declared
authorship dead amid the intellectual and political tumult of 1968. And since that moment,
wave upon critical wave has swept through literature departments: structuralism,
poststructuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, New Historicism, feminism,
postcolonialism, cultural studies.
Along the way, as progressives abandoned the barricades for the faculty lounge, certain
currents of literary theory became identified with leftist politics. The phrase "identity
politics" evokes the culture wars of the 1980s and early 1990s, when conservatives
accused postmodernists of making all things relative, to the detriment of the canon,
critical values, and the culture at large.
Daphne Patai, a professor of Brazilian literature at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst and co-editor of Theory's Empire, argues that theory-driven tendencies in the
profession have fed an obsession with "ersatz politics" among students and done lasting
damage to their literary education. "We're teaching theory to students, we talk to them
about Barthes reading Balzac, and they don't know who Balzac is," she says. "They don't
have a background in literature because that isn't anything that anyone thinks is of value
anymore."
Of her own students she says: "They can very easily see the political bottom line in
everything they read, and that's what they read for. They don't seem to know how to read
any other way."
One no longer need be an avowed opponent of theory to comment publicly on its
excesses. As Amanda Anderson, chairwoman of the English department at Johns
Hopkins, puts it in the introduction to her new book, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in
the Cultures of Theory (forthcoming in January 2006 from Princeton University Press),
poststructuralism and multiculturalism have led to a state of affairs in which "the concept
of critical distance has been seriously discredited."
In the 40 years since Derrida paid that visit to Johns Hopkins, succeeding generations of
scholars have had time to fall in love with theory, fall out of love with it, and learn how
to live with it. As in any long-term relationship, there's a continuing re-evaluation and
reimagining of what works and what does not. Rei Terada, chairwoman of comparative
literature at the University of California at Irvine, says: "As the 60s becomes a historical
period... we can make finer distinctions and groupings among things that seemed all of a
piece closer to the time. ... People are starting to sort out such legacies." No one still
believes, for instance, "that all French theory is politically progressive," she says.
It may be neither fair nor accurate, decades after Theory hit its high-water mark, to keep
using it as a whipping boy for everything that has gone wrong with literary studies. "The
problem of the humanities is funding, lack of institutional support, lowering enrollments,
lowering numbers of hires, the rise of part-time labor," says Andrew Parker, a professor
of English at Amherst College. "This is the real crisis, not whether we have theory with a
capital T or a small T."
Many others interviewed for this article echo those sentiments. "I was astonished when
Theory's Empire was published," Paul H. Fry, a professor of English at Yale University,
writes in an e-mail message. "Literary theory is now a topic that interests a few people as
a matter of intrinsic importance and matters to a few more as an object of historical
research. Why continue to view it as a national threat? What empire?"
Beyond Politics
Whether one sees theory as a present danger or a historical relic, two points emerge from
an examination of how theory is taught in colleges and universities today.
First, theory has become so much part of the literary profession that one needs to have
some familiarity with the "isms," no matter which (if any) one embraces most closely.
Being labeled a theorist does not advance a career the way it might have 10 or 15 years
ago, but theoretical naïveté is a luxury that few aspiring professors can afford. James F.
English, chairman and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in
an e-mail message that while "it's become very rare for literature departments to hire socalled pure theorists," the theoretical movements of the past four decades have "created
an intellectual climate in which a whole range of writers (from Kant and Hegel to Lacan
and Kristeva) is now part of the conversation within literary study as such." It is almost
impossible to imagine a newly minted Ph.D. going on the job market without some grasp
of structuralism as well as of Shakespeare.
"It's really not something that can be excised through surgery," says Amherst's Mr. Parker.
"It's something far more biochemically complex. It's changed the DNA of literary study
from within."
The second point concerns theory's fragmentation. Theory is everywhere, but no one
strand — let alone a consensus about what constitutes it — dominates. Those "isms" are
mixed and matched, used as research tools or as implements to help extract meaning from
texts, or as lures to get students to read those texts in the first place. And in the devolution
from high Theory to hands-on theory, the supposedly dead author and his or her texts
have reclaimed a place at the seminar table.
In a forthcoming essay, "Theory Ends," which will appear in the Modern Language
Association's Profession 2005, Vincent B. Leitch, general editor of The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism and a professor of English at the University of
Oklahoma, reports that "theory in the current framework has at least a half-dozen
different meanings, each of which has a distinct reception history and set of effects."
But this definition, set forth by Mr. Leitch, most closely mirrors what one hears from
those who teach theory: "Theory is widely considered a toolbox of flexible, useful, and
contingent devices, judged for their productivity and innovation."
Mr. Leitch refers to that as "pragmatic theory." And it has a growing number of
practitioners.
For instance, when Amherst College's Mr. Parker taught his "Victorian Novel I" class to
undergraduates this past spring, he says that it resembled "a very traditional Victoriannovel course": six big novels, including Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Charles
Dickens's Dombey and Son, and Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil. The choice of novels is not
radical, but "the questions I ask of this material are not the traditional literary-critical
ones," the professor says. "Although what I do is based on literary form, on sensitivity to
the literary particularities of a novel. ... I'm also interested in theoretical questions about
what the Victorian novel is about."
Alongside Sybil, then, Mr. Parker's students read Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's
"Speeches on Poland" from The Revolutions of 1848, a selection from Engels's The
Condition of the Working Class in England, and part of Thomas Carlyle's Chartism.
And with Dombey and Son, Mr. Parker focuses on how "you can see Dickens using the
novel to address political questions that are addressed in other kinds of writing," he says.
"If you put those writings alongside the novel, you get a very different reading of the
novel. ... That's the kind of thing I can do in a classroom now, post-theory, that is exciting
to me and the student."
Used this way, politics does not stand in the way of appreciating a classic, but enhances it,
say Mr. Parker and others — and the politics in question are as much of Dickens's time as
our own. Students enrolled in such a class may not even know they're being exposed to
theory.
"If you don't tell them it's theory, they won't know it's theory," Mr. Parker says, "but the
questions are theoretically informed. ... Their sense of enjoyment can be amplified by
having a critical relation as well as a fan relation to this work. I think that's what happens
with the Victorian novel."
Graduate-level courses tend by their nature to be more theoretically sophisticated than
those aimed at undergraduates, but there, too, a certain pragmatism and adaptability
prevail.
When she plans her graduate-level classes, Lynn Enterline, a professor of English at
Vanderbilt University, tends to "organize the course around texts and problems they
might raise." If Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is on the syllabus, for instance, she'll
draw on "theories of the performative" in the work of such thinkers as Derrida and the
feminist-psychoanalytic critics Barbara Johnson and Shoshana Felman.
"Since I'm interested in questions of gender, sexuality, and the body," she says, "I tend to
work mostly with rhetorical and psychoanalytic theory."
Her colleagues in the Vanderbilt English department employ a similar strategy in the
classroom, she says, even though their research interests vary widely in topic and
theoretical affinity. "They're all deeply theoretically informed," she says, "but the choices
they would make depend on the problems they're addressing."
Jeffrey J. Williams, a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie
Mellon University and one of the editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism, calls himself "very topic oriented" when it comes to teaching. Carnegie Mellon
has what he describes as a fairly heavy emphasis on theory, and "the students kept
coming to me and complaining that they weren't reading any literature," he says.
His solution? "Now I try to teach hybrid courses." In a recent course on "narratives of
profession," for instance, he mixed sociology and theories of professionalism with half a
dozen novels, and taught Anthony Trollope's Dr. Thorne alongside a history of the
medical profession.
Conflicts and Resolution
Daphne Patai, who edited Theory's Empire with Will H. Corral, an associate professor of
Spanish-American literature at California State University at Sacramento, decries what
she calls the ism-by-ism approach in theory anthologies like the Norton and its many
competitors — and, one might guess, in intro-to-theory courses that use them.
"That's why 'teaching the conflicts,' as Gerald Graff recommended years ago, sounds
better than it actually is, because you have to make hard decisions ... about how to spend
that precious time," observes Ms. Patai. "If you want to spend all your time discussing
whether Conrad was a racist, you're not going to be able to have too much time to study
Conrad."
But those charged with introducing students to theory don't appear to be trying to throw
out Conrad and company. The University of California at Santa Cruz is not known for its
aversion to theory. Even there, theory "is never taught in the absence of literary texts, and
it's never taught as if it's gospel," says Richard Terdiman, a professor of literature and the
history of consciousness. "What we try to do when we teach it is demystify it.
"Everyone who teaches the intro-theory course required for undergraduates in the major
chooses a focus, whether it's Marxism or queer theory or whatever it is, and tries to get
students to see the relevance of the interpretative strategy for their own reading."
At the University of Virginia, Rita Felski, a professor of English, teaches a course called
"Contemporary Literary Theory" to about 70 undergraduates every year. Her syllabus
reads like a hit parade of the last hundred years or so of theory, with one or two pieces by
noted proponents of most of the major movements: New Criticism, Russian formalism,
structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism and deconstruction, feminism,
race and postcolonial theory, queer theory, cultural studies.
But Ms. Felski's course "assumes no prior knowledge of these areas," and its thrust is the
"application of specific theories to literary examples." After her class samples the work of
Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno, they turn to Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho
(surely an invitation to Marxist critique if there ever was one). And so on. Derrida
probably goes down a little more easily when accompanied by a Jorge Luis Borges chaser
(in this case, the short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote").
"I suspect most undergraduate theory classes are pretty similar to the one I teach," Ms.
Felski writes in an e-mail message. Some might add a section on New Historicism, say,
or on philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger who have strongly influenced certain
aspects of literary theory. Graduate-level theory classes, she adds, might include deeper
reading in full-length theoretical works such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Michel
Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Derrida's Of Grammatology, and Edward Said's
Orientalism.
Postcolonialism in general, and Mr. Said's work in particular, are alive and well at most
of the colleges and universities surveyed. At the State University of New York at
Binghamton, according to Joseph Keith, an assistant professor of English, "postcolonial
theory is of particular concern." One of Mr. Keith's colleagues, Monika Mehta, teaches a
course on "Globalization & Literary Culture," in which students read Arundhati Roy's
The God of Small Things and Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir Persepolis alongside
critical readings on global capitalism and fundamentalism.
Meanwhile, at the University of California at Berkeley, Ian Duncan, a professor of
English and the department's chairman, reports via e-mail that "postcolonial,
national/transnational, race and comparative ethnicities studies are flourishing" while
New Historicism "does not exert the hegemony it did 20 years ago, although I think it's
fair to say it's been digested by many of us and maintains a strong presence."
John Kucich, a professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor,
alternatively notes "some kind of a formalist revival going on these days. But I don't
think the people practicing it would call themselves theorists," he says. "There's a new
interest in doing ... projects that are concerned with the formal dynamics of text but
which connect themselves up with some sort of larger thematic project."
Mr. Duncan confirms that "there's a vibrant formalist wing" in his department, as well as
"a strong sentiment among faculty" that the department should institute a formal theory
requirement for its undergraduates.
The Write Stuff
"We believe in a broad intellectual training," says Toril Moi, a professor in the literature
program and the Romance-studies department at Duke University. "So that means
students should know some theory, right?" In practical terms, she observes, theory has
become "part of a cultural-social-historical conversation."
But that conversation has a notorious history of excluding anyone not steeped in theory's
jargon and syntactic complexities. Indeed, what Ms. Moi calls "theorese" has long been a
target of theory's opponents, as well as a subject for parody in the nonacademic world.
Theory's Empire reprints a 1999 Weekly Standard essay by D.G. Myers, an associate
professor of English and religious studies at Texas A&M University, on "Bad Writing" of
the academic variety. "Academic writing in our own time," Mr. Myers commented,
"exhibits a disregard, not merely for style, but for truth." To illustrate his point, he
fastened onto a sentence by Judith Butler that begins: "The move from a structuralist
account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively
homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to
repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the
thinking of structure. ..."
Mr. Keith, of Binghamton, cautions that "trying to map out alternative ways of knowing
is going to be inherently difficult and demanding." Complex concepts sometimes require
complex terminology, and hurling abuse at theory for its "excessive difficulty has been
used too often as an overly quick strategy of dismissing and not engaging."
Still, he writes via e-mail, "I think there has been a turn back to history ... and away from
the more pure textuality of deconstruction at its peak — which lent itself to rhetorical
pyrotechnics or overindulgence."
That raises the question of whether that historical turn, and the general devolution of
theory, will translate into more accessible work. As literature reasserts itself alongside
theory in the classroom, will academic writing shake off the formulations and jargon of
"theorese"?
Jennifer Crewe, associate director and editorial director of Columbia University Press and
the editor who acquired Theory's Empire, sees many revised dissertations that have been
submitted in hopes that the press will publish them. Lately, in "writing style and method
of presentation," she says, "it's getting back to being a little more traditional, going back
to looking at the literature itself and not only writing about the theory."
Although "it's still very hard for people to wean themselves from the jargon," she says, "I
think people have gotten the message they have to make themselves clear. If you're clear,
you have a chance of having a broader audience."
There are signs, too, that literary theorists are actively seeking to redefine theory in a way
that reconnects it to bigger ideas.
Amanda Anderson's The Way We Argue Now highlights, among other evolutions, what
she sees as a push beyond the restrictions imposed by identity politics. "Contemporary
theory is already pursuing a less constrained understanding of first-person experience
(singular and plural)," she writes, "one which finds expression in ways that consistently
exceed the sociological grid. This is evident in what many have hailed as a general turn to
ethics, but it is also evident in recent forms of theory for which ... a kind of cultivated
ethos or characterological stance seems central, if not fully theorized."
That's not exactly generalist parlance, but it gestures toward concerns — ethics, for
instance — shared by people outside academic literary circles.
In branching out, or reaching out, theory risks losing some of what made it powerful and
seductive in the first place. In his essay "Theory Ends," Mr. Leitch offers up one final
definition of theory: "a historically new, postmodern mode of discourse that breaches
longstanding borders, fusing literary criticism, philosophy, history, sociology,
psychoanalysis, and politics." The result, he says, is a "cross-disciplinary pastiche" that
falls under the increasingly wide banner of cultural studies.
Mr. Williams, of Carnegie Mellon, who is 46 and came of age professionally during
theory's heyday (as did most of the people interviewed for this article), says that everyone
his age or younger "does a cultural project, and everyone says they do cultural studies."
This is not, as he points out, your father's cultural studies — not the pathbreaking stuff
that the British were doing in the 1960s and 70s, for instance — and it may not even be
theory in any classic or intellectually rigorous sense. "I think there's a common practice,"
Mr. Williams says, "but common practice is not theory." What he sees in action is "a kind
of generalized and vague sense of cultural history adapted for literary criticism. It's like
literary cultural history. I think that's what most people are doing."
Mr. Williams points out that as universities lose funds, the humanities have come under
more pressure, external and internal, to justify themselves, "not by saying that we do this
high-research thing called theory, which nobody seems to care about, but to deliver the
goods in a way that engineering does. ... People might not always like what we say about
culture, but it's a very traditional, tried-and-true rationale for humanities and literary
criticism."
So the devolution and fragmentation of theory may well be a survival strategy, an
adaptation to the new realities of academic institutions. An optimist might see it as
something nobler, a turn from linguistic grand gestures and outdated ideological gambits
toward measurements taken on a more humanistic scale.
Ms. Moi describes an evolution that is at least as cerebral or conceptual as practical. She
has noted "a tendency to take a broader cultural view" in the field generally and, among
her graduate students at least, a new and noteworthy ambition. "We do not need
intellectuals to be disciples ... ," she says. "I'm seeing quite a lot of dissertations that want
to change our understanding of, say, modernism or Romanticism or postcolonialism or
what film is." Their reach may exceed their grasp, she says, but "it gives them the
salutary feeling that they will never, ever know it all."
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Volume 52, Issue 17, Page A12