Theory Matters

Vincent Leitch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135204976
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

First Published in 2003. In this book on what theory means today, the general editor of the Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory explores how theory has altered the way the humanities do business. Theory got personal, went global, became popular, and in the process has changed everything we thought we knew about intellectual life. One of the most adroit and perceptive observers of the critical scene, Vincent Leitch offers these engaging snapshots to show how theory is at work. This is an utterly readable little book by one of our best historians on the theoretical turn that over the past thirty years has so powerfully changed the academy.

PART 1 Theory Personalized

1 THEORY RETROSPECTIVE

DOI: 10.4324/9780203700556-3

LATELY I HAVE BEEN WONDERING how I got here. I mean that I have been trying to map the stages of my profession s development during the past three decades, the time of my involvement in academic literary studies, particularly criticism and theory, my specialty. In retrospect, I see that it is a story, in large part, about U.S. university culture in the late twentieth century being Europeanized one more time, becoming self-consciously multicultural, and undergoing postmodernization. When I committed myself to literary studies as an undergraduate in the mid-1960s, New Criticism was the ruling paradigm, which had been in place, not without various telling challenges, for several decades. It was not until the mid-1970s that this oppressive formalism gave way to “poststructuralism” (as it was oddly called), a peculiar set of literary philosophical methods and frames of reference largely derived from Friedrich Nietzsche but filtered through Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault, among others. Itself dominant for more than a decade—though not without significant challenges—poststructuralism mutated from its French roots in response to more local problems and challenges, particularly those brought to the surface in the late 1970s and early 80s by feminists, ethnic autonomy groups, and postcolonial thinkers. I have more to say later about the branches of poststructuralism. By the middle or late 1980s, various united fronts of literary social critics, feminists, postcolonial theorists, historians of culture, scholars of popular culture, rhetoricians, and left poststructuralists like myself began promoting cultural studies, many extending models developed during the 1970s in the United Kingdom's celebrated Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. So what you had in U.S. university departments of literary studies through the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s was an ascendant cultural studies, increasingly capacious and broadly defined, simultaneously incorporating and displacing a once-dominant literary poststructuralism, both of which movements were held at arm's length by certain feminists, postcolonial theorists, ethnic critics, queer theorists, and leftists reluctant to join coalitions for fear of invisibility or cooptation. I hasten to add that New Criticism, to which many literary intellectuals trained in the 1940s and 1950s remained faithful, survived into the twenty-first century both as a besieged residual paradigm of “normative” literary education and a resurrected charter adopted by a small number of a young generation of new belletrists often associated with creative writing programs. To summarize using more emotional terms, in my experience U.S. academic critics and criticism can be characterized as comparatively complacent through most of the 1960s, frantic and expansive in the 1970s, embattled in the 1980s, and surprisingly ambitious yet generally glum during the 1990s. A detailed chronicle of everyday life during these years would enrich and complicate matters, needless to say, as would a less generalized more personal account of intellectual development, something I offer in chapter 2.

To simplify matters even further, I came into literary studies at a moment of extreme critical contraction and purification, and I have lived through an era of staggering expansion and hybridization. At the point at which in the 1980s cultural studies first grappled with the question of postmodernity, that is, when it started to map the global culture of the emergent “New World Order,” academic literary horizons entered into a phase of extreme expansion, a time, still today, when popular music such as West Coast Afrocentric rap is scrutinized beside Shakespeare's Italianate sonnets; when contemporary global corporate practices such as downsizing and Renaissance patterns of aristocratic patronage both help explain publication practices as well as poetic themes and forms.¹

Permit me to preview the trajectory of this chapter. First, I offer a personal retrospective on the tumultuous period in literary studies from the 1960s through the present, the time of my involvement as university student, professor, and scholar specializing in the history of literary and cultural criticism and theory. Second, I compare and contrast the three dominant critical paradigms of this period, namely, New Criticism, poststructuralism, and cultural studies, as a way to portray and assess the broad intellectual and cultural struggles of the times. I conclude with some personal reflections on theory now and in the future.

My overarching thesis is that the peculiar coexistence within literature departments today of different generational projects and critical paradigms reflects, in miniature, the wider disorganization characteristic of Western societies in recent decades, a form of disaggregation that renders pastiche arguably our dominant organizational mode. Not incidentally, the contemporary university itself does not escape this form.²

WRITING SCHOLARLY BOOKS: INTERSECTIONS OF THE PERSONAL AND THE PROFESSIONAL

One way or another, I have been entangled in all these historical developments I have been enumerating, as have virtually all members of university departments of English and, perhaps to a lesser extent, departments of comparative and national literatures. My book publications offer four case studies of my various involvements over the years, providing a retrospective on what has happened in the profession. When I published Deconstructive Criticism in 1983 (which was seven years in the making), it was, objectively speaking, a comparative historical account of first-generation French and American poststructuralist criticism but, speaking personally, it represented an anxious effort on my part to master certain innovative contemporary Continental philosophical modes of criticism as a way to get free of the enervated Anglo-American formalist criticism into which I had been indoctrinated as an undergraduate and then graduate student, and which I had been trying more or less unsuccessfully to modify and eventually jettison for almost a decade. Under the cover of an advanced introduction, this book facilitated an expansive practice of poststructuralist textual analysis. What it did not do was promote the shift of textual analysis to cultural critique, a project that younger French feminists and second-generation U.S. poststructuralists, intellectuals such as Gayatri Spivak, were undertaking at that time and that, as I noted before, culminated some five to ten years later with the emergence of cultural studies. Shortly, I'll have a word to say about cultural critique, which entails the explicit turn of poststructuralist styles of criticism to ethics and politics.

In the United States, departments of literary study were especially embattled sites during the 1980s as different paradigms of interpretation and of the curriculum were pitted against each other. The paradigm wars of those times are still with us, although usually in less disruptive forms. When in 1988 I published American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to 1980s, I sought to retell a complex segment of the history of criticism from the perspective of a left cultural historiography sympathetic to all manner of contemporary antinomian groups and forces, ranging from Marxism and poststructuralism to the new social movements (notably feminism, the black power movement, and the New Left). U.S. cultural history had a different look from this point of view, of course, but what preoccupied me personally was the effort to help change literature departments by telling graduate students and new professors, my main audiences, a story of their history culminating in the (momentary) triumphs of feminism, ethnic aesthetics, and cultural studies. This was my way of galvanizing myself and others toward transforming the institution of criticism and theory from its still powerful, yet too narrowly focused, formalist heritage to its expansive cultural studies future. To do this, I had to put myself step by step through an extensive education in the history of American criticism and theory, which willy-nilly helped me accrue a great deal of knowledge and become an authority, oddly an unlooked-for outcome.

It is one thing to write a partisan history and another to change the order of things through direct argumentation. I found in publishing Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism in 1992 that the effort to shape the emerging cultural studies project so that it took certain key techniques and solutions from poststructuralism on its way beyond poststructuralism offered narrow rewards. I personally worked up effective solutions to a number of key problems such as how to conceptualize “authorship,” “genre,” “discourse,” and “institution” from the vantage of poststructuralist cultural theory and criticism. I also experienced an obvious truth: an emerging paradigm or vanguard movement is not necessarily interested in learning lessons from its immediate predecessors, nor in resolving its debts to more distant and less threatening progenitors. To the considerable extent that one writes books not just for audiences, such as fellow critics, scholars, and students, but for oneself (oneself always being at a certain crucial stage of development), this particular book has been for me the most important, even though it was poorly targeted and not well-timed. It forced me to move from understanding and promoting poststructuralism and cultural studies, through writing comparative histories, to theorizing poststructuralist solutions to cultural studies problems via scholarly polemics. It is a matter of doing—not just advocating—cultural critique, which entails investigating and criticizing contending positions and explanations with an eye toward not simply faulty logic, but questionable values, practices, and representations, requiring subtle yet frank ethical and political as well as aesthetic judgments. Robert Scholes nicely dubbed this “textual power” in a book with that title.

By the time I published Postmodernism—Local Effects, Global Flows in 1996, which offered a set of essays on different facets of post-1950s culture, cultural studies had triumphed, but in the limited way that most theoretical movements and paradigms succeed in university literature departments.

Here let me diverge to say a word about universities and educational innovation before I return to cultural studies. While contemporary university presses, scholarly journals, and academic conferences often welcome the latest developments, the curricula of both the literature major and the liberal arts core remain largely unaffected, accommodating change at a snail's pace by adding on yet one more option to a large number of preexisting options.³ In my experience, curriculum innovation comes slowly and grudgingly—and long after the fact. Universities are strikingly conservative when it comes to undergraduate curriculum. None of this stops individual instructors or like-minded colleagues and students from making de facto changes, at first discreetly and then more boldly, often engendering in the process hostile enclaves and factions. During recent decades departments, or frequently segments of departments, refused or failed to change, with the result that at any given moment departments can be in very different stages of development, which is one more site of the disaggregation characteristic of postmodern times.

All this explains why I included for the first time arguments about curriculum theory in the book on postmodern culture. Not incidentally, this text also offered expected chapters on contemporary criticism, poetry, philosophy, and feminism, plus new material on recent painting, theology, historiography, and economics, especially finance economics, today a leading edge of globalization along with media and advertising. In our postmodern condition, culture is in the last successful stages of incorporating nature, including nature's wildest zones. Media constitute the vanguard, capital the engine.⁴ I take up these matters again in chapters 8 and 9.

I want to circle back and comment on some important issues that I glossed over when discussing cultural studies. First, I prefer to think not that literary studies (or university education) was tragically politicized in recent decades, say since the 1960s, but that it was peculiarly depoliticized in the 1940s and 1950s as part of the “end of ideology” campaign waged during the early years of the Cold War, a period now noted in history for its reactionary cultural politics symbolized by Mc-Carthyism. In this scenario, cultural studies represents something like a return to normal after an aberrant period of reaction that tended to fetishize disembodied great works along with pure science and unending progress. Second, literary and cultural critics throughout the twentieth century have engaged in historical analysis and criticism, although historicism was largely out of favor during the mid-century hegemony of New Criticism. The return to historicisms in recent decades (if one can actually say “return”) strikes me as a healthy turn of events, especially for criticism and theory. (I avoid discussing here today's contending modes of historiography, instead taking that up in chapter 4.) Third, the triumph of cultural studies is, to be sure, a complicated matter. At best such a “triumph” is limited insofar as university programs often bear skimpy evidence of such success. To the extent that cultural studies has mutated into a broad academic front under which almost any research goes, it serves as an example of innovation as mixed blessing. This is what I intimated when I suggested that a point of maximum expansion had been reached. Not surprisingly, cultural studies is in the process of segmentation, involving an as yet indistinct (re)constellation of the field around relatively autonomous new problems and hybrid subfields. The maturation of visual cultural studies in the mid-1990s provides an example: here fashion, art history, design, architecture, film, and television studies have been reconfigured so as to focus on “the look,” that is, the historically constructed visual styling and modes of perception, characteristic of periods and cultures (or, more commonly, subcultures). Fourth, there is a tragedy unfolding in that many current graduate students are at once dedicated to cultural studies and effectively cut out of the profession because there are virtually no departments of cultural studies to hire them. Once in a while a literature department hires a token person. When the remnants of this new generation get into power a decade or two from now, departments of cultural studies will, no doubt, belatedly spring up across the United States. The glumness characteristic of literature departments starting in the 1990s had a great deal to do with both the depressed job market for new Ph.D.s and the institutional bottlenecking of cultural studies.

Let me sum up these comments on the changing historical situations surrounding my own research and publication by observing that, for good or ill, the professional conditions and shapes the personal and vice versa. One does not simply look into one's heart and write. To be heard and received at all requires submission to a period of training, credentialing, and professionalization. If in this case the personal is a much diminished thing, undergirded and determined (as it demonstrably is) by institutional and professional requirements, so be it: we might as well face the facts of our postmodernity, which seems at every turn to be closing in on the spaces of “individualism” so lauded during more Romantic periods. I for one refuse to be maudlin about this, since I find Romantic individualism to be an inadequate account of subject formation and identity dynamics. We are all post-Romantic, whether we admit it or not. None of this means that personal transformation or professional change has come to an end, but that their dynamics operate differently than traditional accounts allow.

ASSESSING READING PRACTICES: FROM NEW CRITICISM TO POSTSTRUCTURALISM TO CULTURAL STUDIES

It would be remiss of me in this theory retrospective not to spell out and assess the protocols and procedures involved in the different theories of interpretation advocated by New Criticism, poststructuralism, and cultural studies, respectively. This is the heart of the matter, the scene of instruction for several generations, and I like other academic literary intellectuals have had much to argue about regarding the formations and transformations of advanced reading practices during the past three decades.⁵ As I portray and evaluate each of the three modes of interpretation, I am working from my experience of these professional paradigms. Critical methods are recipes for personal performance that tend toward ritualization, which is what I mainly expound upon here, although I do not mean to discount the innumerable singularities, innovations, and inspired eccentricities characteristic of much exegesis. The breakdown of method provides its own rewards. When it tends toward heuristics rather than dogmatism, method attains its best form.

To interpret as a New Critic—to revisit this primal scene one more time—is to demonstrate by means of multiple rereadings and retrospective analyses of short individual canonical poetic texts the intricacy of highly wrought artistic forms, whose meanings consist not in extractable propositions or paraphrasable contents, but in exquisitely orchestrated textual connotations, tones, images, and symbols, intrinsic to the literary work itself preconceived as an autonomous and unified, dramatic artifact separate from the lives of the author and reader as well as from the work's sociohistorical milieu and its everyday language. In order to display the complex equilibrium, special economy, and internal purposiveness of the well-wrought verbal icon (i.e., the ideal literary work), the New Critic invariably takes recourse in paradox, ambiguity, and irony, which are pragmatic rhetorical instruments used to harmonize any and all textual incongruities so as to ensure aesthetic unity, the endpoint and goal of analysis.

There is, of course, a lot to criticize in this dense and powerful midcentury reading formation still referred to honorifically...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part 1 Theory Personalized
• Part 2 Cultural Studies Practiced
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index