Literature in Theory

Policy Review, Feb/Mar 2006 by Berkowitz, Peter

Literature in Theory DAPHNE PATAI AND WILL H. CORRAL, EDS., Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. 736 PAGES. $29.50

THE LOVE OF literature is endangered, and for more than three decades a large faction of professors of literature has contributed to extinguishing the flame.

True, large social forces are also implicated. Literature takes time, but these days women as well as men work long hours, and for many, the satisfaction they derive from their jobs provides an essential component of happiness. Literature requires leisure, but more and more adults, to say nothing of children, live frenetically paced, ruthlessly scheduled lives and learn to survive by multitasking - on the job, at home, out on the town, on the road. Literature needs sustained concentration, but TV and film have conditioned us to take our entertainment in one helping: Even in the movie theater, which shuts out distraction, we grow antsy if the tale requires more than two hours to move from beginning to middle to end. Literature calls for calm, reflection, and the ability to be alone with oneself, but the telecommunications revolution, proceeding from telegraph and telephone through radio and film to TV, cassette tapes, video, CDs, DVDs, email, Internet, cell phones, instant messaging, and podcasting, enables us to surround ourselves with an endless flow of entertaining stimulation that serves as a buffer between us and our thoughts. Literature depends on the willingness to linger over a phrase, to luxuriate in an image, to peruse a passage again and again, but information-age inundation by the written and spoken word encourages gluttony for, rather than pleasure in, words. Although any particular individual can go a long way toward solving the problem with the flick of a few switches and the pulling of a few plugs, there is no going back for society as a whole, and there will be no quick and easy fixes as society moves forward.

In these circumstances, it would be advantageous if our universities provided a haven from the forces so inimical to the love of literature. To do this, they need only live up to their official mission, which includes safeguarding knowledge of the cultural and intellectual treasures of the past, transmitting an appreciation of them to today's students, and, at the same time, equipping students to challenge authoritative interpretations and think for themselves. Unfortunately, the teaching of literature at our universities today routinely makes matters worse, burying knowledge of the classics, deadening students' literary sensibilities, and demanding students' assent to a partisan, dogmatic, and incoherent system of beliefs.

This bizarre campaign goes back almost 40 years, to the importation from France into American literary studies of the then-fashionable ideas of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, philosopher and literary scholar Jacques Derrida, and historian and social critic Michel Foucault, among others. It flies the flag of a thing sometimes called deconstruction, sometimes postmodernism, sometimes poststructuralism, but most commonly, among literature professors, Theory. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education ("The Fragmentation of Literary Theory," December 16, 2005) confirms that though it has splintered into schools and sects, Theory remains a powerful force in literature departments around the country. In the superb introduction to their valuable anthology of dissent from the dominant paradigm, editors Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral quote from the introduction to the authoritative Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001) to illustrate the tremendous claims that professors make on Theory's behalf:

There are very good reasons that . . . contemporary theory now frames the study of literature and culture in academic institutions. Theory raises and answers questions about a broad array of fundamental issues, some old and some new, pertaining to reading and interpretive strategies, literature and culture, tradition and nationalism, genre and gender, meaning and paraphrase, originality and intertextuality, authorial intention and the unconscious, literary education and social hegemony, standard language and heteroglossia, poetics and rhetoric, representation and truth, and so on.

The precious "and so on" further emphasizes, as if the string of amazing topics concerning which Theory "raises and answers questions" did not make crystal clear, the all-but-limitless claims to complete and final knowledge asserted by Theory's partisans. Indeed, whatever version of it is embraced, Theory is to a considerable segment of the present generation of literature professors what the Dialectic was to previous generations of Marxist intellectuals - the key to almost everything.

CONTEMPORARY LITERARY theory did not emerge in an intellectual and cultural vacuum. The subordination of art to argument and ideas has been a long time in the works. In The Painted Word, a rumination on the state of American painting in the 1970s, Tom Wolfe described an epiphany he had one Sunday morning while reading an article in the New York Times on an exhibit at Yale University. To appreciate contemporary art - the paintings of Jackson Pollack and still more so his followers - which to the naked eye appeared indistinguishable from kindergarten splatterings and which provided little immediate pleasure or illumination, it was "crucial," Wolfe realized, to have a "persuasive theory," a prefabricated conceptual lens to make sense of the work and bring into focus the artist's point. From there it was just a short step to the belief that the critic who supplies the theories is the equal, if not the superior, of the artist who creates the painting.