Theory's Empire

An Anthology of Dissent

Daphne Patai, Wilfrido Corral, Daphne Patai, Wilfrido Corral

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9780231508698
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Not too long ago, literary theorists were writing about the death of the novel and the death of the author; today many are talking about the death of Theory. Theory, as the many theoretical ism's (among them postcolonialism, postmodernism, and New Historicism) are now known, once seemed so exciting but has become ossified and insular. This iconoclastic collection is an excellent companion to current anthologies of literary theory, which have embraced an uncritical stance toward Theory and its practitioners. Written by nearly fifty prominent scholars, the essays in Theory's Empire question the ideas, catchphrases, and excesses that have let Theory congeal into a predictable orthodoxy. More than just a critique, however, this collection provides readers with effective tools to redeem the study of literature, restore reason to our intellectual life, and redefine the role and place of Theory in the academy.

PART I

THEORY RISING

INTRODUCTION

THE ESSAYS IN PART 1 prepare the ground for the contributions appearing later in this book. They all address the drastic change of focus forced upon the professional study of literature by the rise to unprecedented prominence of Theory and by the influence it commands in the academy. They argue for restoring a sense of balance, mindful of tradition and above all consistent with reason, to theorizing about literature. They also show—again and again—the cumulative drive that pushes theories to build upon one another as their authors’ assumptions (ideological as well as conceptual) go unexamined.

The new theoretical trends that began in the 1960s and came to the fore in the 1970s and 1980s could not simply be ignored, for, as the star system in academe developed, major figures acquired a visibility, even in the mass media, that had to be acknowledged. The same decades also saw attempts by scholars of different backgrounds and preferences to address the many problems evident in the new theories and theorists. These scholars searched for a common basis on which to ground the discussion of literature under the onslaught of new ideas and articulated their objections to the growing irrationalism and abstruseness of contemporary Theory. Unfortunately, the potential impact of their work was stymied by the fear among academics (especially younger ones) of the charge of being “anti-theory.” A further impediment was the reluctance of some dissenting critics (such as Christopher Ricks, cited in our general introduction) to engage in debates they came to consider futile and even unprincipled. This hesitancy still exists today—such is the force of the high status Theory has arrogated to itself.

Part 1 presents seven essays describing the transformation of theory into Theory. This mutation, while generating considerable excitement in the profession, was accompanied by the progressive relegation of literature and its study—not to mention the pleasure it afforded its devotees—to a lesser place by theorists whom most of our contributors perceive as dismissive of the humanistic values inherent in literature.

We begin with a recent essay by Valentine Cunningham, who questions the claim of Theory (the capital T is Cunningham's) to be an innovative, even revolutionary project. Not so, argues Cunningham. Theory always revisits, albeit in new guises, older critical concerns and practices, hence “theorizing about literature is always a palimpsest.” Nonetheless, Theory is now ubiquitous in language and literature departments. But what, really, is Theory? Even its enthusiasts have difficulty defining it. And this, Cunningham states, is because theorists have gathered a host of subjects under the umbrella term “Theory.” Conflating its many constituent parts into a set of “master tropes” held together by an “obsessive linguicity,” Theory has easily penetrated kindred disciplines like history and architecture. This expansion beyond the realm of literature has made Theory “the greatest intellectual colonizer of all time.”

René Wellek, whose essay was written more than two decades ago, cautioned that literary studies were being destroyed from within. His warning has been more than justified in the succeeding years and is therefore worth revisiting. Wellek delineates the varying motifs and aims of the attack: abolition of the aesthetic, denial of literature's referentiality to reality, assaults on the authority of the text, blurring the distinction between poetry and critical prose, rejection of the ideal of correct (as if this meant single) interpretations, the displacement of artists by critics. Affirming the need for a clarification of principles and methods—the impulse that had led Wellek to write (with Austin Warren) Theory of Literature (1949), the first book in English with this title—Wellek notes that Theory has prevailed “with a vengeance,” resulting in a loss of interest in analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of literary works.

Next, Tzvetan Todorov offers a brief, highly critical survey of the state of Theory in the United states in the mid-1980s. Both deconstruction (texts are endlessly ambiguous, the world outside is inaccessible, only discourse exists) and pragmatism (texts can mean anything, it is readers who give them meaning) fail, in Todorov's judgment, as viable critical stances, owing to their exaggerations, contradictions, confusions, ethical blind spots, and frivolity. It is their very dogmatism, Todorov contends, that explains their success in the academy: they offer formulas that can be applied to anything. What, then, remains for the critic who feels that literature bears some relation to the world and insists that some values are better than others? Not Marxism, despite its popularity in the academy, for it shares with deconstruction and pragmatism a common antihumanist posture. It is antihumanism, then, that dominates American criticism. To put this “regrettable episode” behind us, Todorov urges critics to attend, once again, to this question: What does the text mean?

Morris Dickstein gauges the distance that has been traveled between I. A. Richards's Practical Criticism, published in 1929, and the writings of today's celebrated theorists. Like Cunningham, Dickstein perceives the arc that can be traced from Richards to Barthes and Derrida as changes in the way we are taught to read. The gap between readers and critics opened by New Criticism, with its encouragement of a pedagogic style, was only widened by the advent of poststructuralism, which for Dickstein was another turn of the wheel of a modernist self-consciousness that arrived belatedly in France. Generous in his appreciation of poststructuralists such as Barthes and Derrida, Dickstein sees these figures as more perceptive than their method suggests. But the influence of their writing on academic criticism, he concludes, has been numbing, leading, among other characteristics, to an “impenetrable elite jargon.”

Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller present a revised and updated chapter of their 1992 book Re-Thinking Theory, which takes issue with the literary theorizing of the 1980s. For Freadman and Miller, the more recent isms favored by Theory have exacerbated the problems of what they term “constructivist antihumanism,” with its denial of referentiality, repudiation of the individual subject, and dissolution of substantive evaluative discourse. These are all features, they argue, inimical to constructing adequate literary theories. Instead, they propose connecting theory to the world by demonstrating how fictional discourse can furnish readers with significant truths.

In an essay targeting race, class, and gender criticism in particular, John Ellis insists that the deficiencies of some theoretical practices must not be held against theory in general. His charge is against Bad Theory, the kind that has replaced theory's true and original function—analysis—with mere assertion, blatant advocacy, and dismissive intolerance. In Bad Theory objectivity is held to be an illusion, all knowledge is socially constructed, diligent scrutiny is superseded by posturing and verbal tricks. Bad Theory soaks up ideas from other fields without having mastered them. Ellis concludes that this impoverished set of beliefs and practices has come to be wholly identified with theory itself—a mistake Ellis attempts to rectify.

Denis Donoghue's essay, with which part 1 closes, reminds us that the term “theory” has, in recent times, been appropriated by followers of what is, in essence, an institutionalized belief system claiming total explanatory force. To this pretense to holding the key to universal explanation he counterposes theory as an experimental or heuristic procedure, a theory always of something (not of everything), requiring argument and evidence. Donoghue's particular target in this essay is Derrida, whose deconstructionist dogma pronounced authoritatively on such fundamental matters as truth and falsehood, morality and immorality, law, politics—indeed on the entire realm of discourse. Accept this persuasion, Donoghue warns, and you will have abandoned the power of “adjudicating on true and false, right and wrong.” Donoghue's essay thus seeks to elucidate what is at stake when theory rises to the level of an unyielding orthodoxy.

1. THEORY, WHAT THEORY?

VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM

To read on a system … is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF, “HOURS IN A LIBRARY”

WE ALL—all of us readers—come after theory. Certainly. But what theory? It's commonly said and assumed that we've lived through a theory revolution in the last few decades. And this is correct. We live within an abundance of apparently novel theories, approaches, terminology, rhetorics. Theory is everywhere. It's rare to find anywhere now a published discussion or reading of literature, or to hear a lecture on a literary topic, certainly by a professional critic from the academy, which doesn't deploy critical terms quite unknown before, say, 1965, and which is not paying homage to named theorists of literature who might well have been writing before then but were known only to a few closeup chums and colleagues. A critical Rip Van Winkle waking up now after fifty years of slumber wouldn't recognize the critical tower of Babel he'd returned to. Cynics think that literary studies have always been too much in love with neologisms, because we're all a bunch of pseudo-scientists desperate for a rationale for our work and so always on the qui vive for highfalutin importantsounding terminologies to dazzle and confute our critics and opponents with. If that is even nearly so, then the last few decades will have been peculiarly satisfying for insiders, for the literary-critical business simply bristles now with critical neologisms, our readerly sky quite brilliantly alight with rhetorical bravado. Our Theory lexicon certainly puts on a good show. Or a bad one, if you're one of Theory's many enemies. (The terminological sword swings both ways.)

You can easily spot “postmodernist” departments of literature, says the conservative U.S. National Association of Scholars, if their Course Catalogues use any items from a list of 115 deplorable Theory items the Association (www.nas.org) has helpfully drawn up. This long, shiny hit-list includes: agency, AIDS, Baudrillard, bodies, canonicity, Chomsky, cinematic, classism, codes, color, contextualism, decentered, Deleuze, de Man, Derrida, discourse, dominant, erotic, eurocentric, feminism, feminisms, feminist, Foucault, Freud, Freudian, gay, gayness, gaze, gender, gendered, Guattari, gynocentric, hegemon, hegemonic, heteronormative, heterosexism, historicist, homoeroticism, identity, ideology, imperialism, incest, Lacan, lesbian, lesbianism, logocentric, Lyotard, maleness, marginalized, Marxism, modernism, oppression, otherness, patriarchal, patrimony, phallocentric, postcolonialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, power, praxis, psychosexual, queer, queered, queering, race, sex, sexism, sexualities, slavery, structuralism, subaltern, subjectivism, theory, transgendered, transsexual, voice, whiteness, womanism, womyn.¹

Merrily listing sixty of the NAS's terms, the London Times Literary Supplement (6 October 2000) chortled that you should apply to the colleges which evinced “the highest percentage” of such “postmodern” terminology “if this makes your brain cells shine with delight.” But both the NAS and the TLS are missing the point; the historical point. For these terms and approaches to literature, the reading interests they suggest and promote, are simply everywhere in university departments of English and of other literatures, and in faculties and sub-faculties devoted to studies, such as Cultural Studies, which also use literature as evidence and certainly encourage the “reading” of social “texts” as an investigative method. They're normal and normative. Contemporary reading, certainly as that is attempted in universities, cannot, apparently, do without them—and many more of their ilk.

Theory of the kinds indicated by the NAS list—what I'm calling Theory with a capital T—is simply ubiquitous. Much of what comes under this title is not, of course, strictly speaking, theoretical—at least not in a scientific sense of a proposition, a model, a theorem, a description telling you in a testable, provable-disprovable fashion what literature and the literary are and how they or one or other of their branches function. But then poems, novels, genres of literature, are not like an enzyme, say, or an atomic sub-particle, or a chemical element, nor even like moons or that large rambling entity the human body (even though “body” is, of course, a favorite metaphor for literary things: “body of writings,” we say; “body of work”; “in the body of the text”; and so on), so perhaps we would be simply wrong to expect theories of the literary to function as do scientific cognitive instruments, models, theorems, mathematical symbols, and equations. Which doesn't stop many Theorists wanting this scientificism. Some achieve something like it. The closer to linguistics the Theorist operates the more possible and convincing this is. The linguistic parts and structures and functions of writing—a dental fricative, it might be, or a phoneme, a dative, a signifier, a sentence—are not dissimilar in their knowability and boundedness to particles or moons, objects whose nature and behavior can be identified and predicted and truly theorized. It's quite a bit otherwise with Satire, or the Novel, or the Sixteenth Century.

Much of what is offered as literary theory, and Theory especially, poses as a set of genetic codes for literature, as what Gerard Genette has called a “constitutive” or “essentialist” poetics, as what E. D. Hirsch means by a “general hermeneutics.” But in practice most “theory,” and Theory not least, comes down to what Stanley Fish has called mere rules of thumb, or Genette's “conditionalist poetics,” i.e., temporarily useful lines and avenues of reading approach, utilities of interpretation, simple practices of criticism (as Fish has suggested), principles of reading, mere matters of belief, of hunch even—the mess of useful assumptions I happen to have in my critical kitbag, postures and practices driven by contingency and pragmatism as much as by necessity, sometimes even downright blagues and try-ons, things the “theorist” has just thought of.²

Theorists don't like the charge of untheoretical messiness, and work hard to disprove it. Some have tried to lean on etymology for the strict meaning of their work, and invoke the originating Greek word theoros, spectator. So theory becomes spectator work, what onlookers and audiences do. And of course much Theory has invoked the defining authority and presence of “the interpretive community” and “reader responses” as well as various sorts of readerly “gaze” as fixable markers of the pursuit. But such invocations remain as slippery and elusive as so much else that interests Theorists, and they keep failing to harden up into the tough objects of the would-be scientific gaze their deployers crave. Indeed thinking of theory/Theory as a kind of spectator sport does rather give the game away. What precisely is an interpretive community? It's just one very loose cannon of a notion knocking about the Theoretical field. And loose cannons generate loose canons of Theory—more conditionalist than constitutive, to use Genette's distinction. Literary theorizing is generally at some remove from what the German vocabulary claims is Literaturwissenschaft, literary science. And this is so ev...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Part I. Theory Rising
• Part II. Linguistic Turns
• Part III. Empire Building
• Part IV. Theory as a Profession
• Part V. Identities
• Part VI. Theory as Surrogate Politics
• Part VII. Restoring Reason
• Part VIII. Still Reading After All These Theories …
• Coda
• List of Contributors
• Index