thirty years ago at the start of the theory revolution. While I cannot share Perkins’s nostalgia for a past that I consider racist, sexist, reactionary, and substantially anti-intellectual, I will grant the claim that provoked his search for avian infiltrators: Keats and the traditional canon may not be headed for extinction but they do occupy a lot less of our attention than they did a few decades ago.
If the brutally selective canon we studied then were merely a function of concern for quality or value, as Perkins believes, then a pervasive sense of loss might be justified. Yet I have no doubt whatsoever that this was not the case. As a literature major from 1963 to 1967—at Antioch College, arguably the most progressive college in the country—I read not a single work by an African American writer in any course and only a few works by women. I can in fact only remember being assigned Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. A number of us read other things on our own, but that was the extent of our assigned readings by women and minorities. Antioch did have a highly successful Black Students Association at the time, but its members focused on other issues. Even the black students themselves knew so little about the Afro-American literary heritage that they saw no reason to place any pressure on the literature curriculum. As for feminism, the contemporary movement did not begin to have an impact on the curriculum until the mid- to late 1970s.
My anecdotal evidence is supported by research Michael Berube reports in his Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers (1992). Except for some presentations on “Negro folk songs” delivered in the 1920s and 1930s, the Modern Language Association’s annual convention offered no papers on African American writing until one delivered in 1953; a decade passed before another such paper was presented. Similarly, by 1950 the annual MLA bibliography listed only two contemporary studies of African American writers, both being books on the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar (43–44). As late as the 1960s the mainstream anthologies published by Norton gave virtually no space to African American writers. So it is not surprising that African American writers were not widely taught in white institutions or that they received only narrow attention even in historically black colleges. Indeed, the hostility toward their work voiced by some of the New Critics, such as Cleanth Brooks’s dismissal of Langston Hughes in his 1939 Modern Poetry and the Tradition, reinforced widespread institutional racism. I will have more to say about race and the curriculum both in this chapter and in chapter 5. For now, suffice it to say that the past some reactionary critics evoke nostalgically is not a past to which many Americans would eagerly return.
Yet the role of theory in provoking canonical expansion has actually been somewhat limited. Certainly there are many more theory courses than there were as recently as the 1970s, and feminist theory has successfully pressed academics to read and teach much more widely in forgotten works by women. Although political and social theory about racism has helped press the academy to begin reforming itself, literary and interpretive theory cannot take much credit for the gradual inclusion of works by minority writers in scholarship and teaching. Indeed we did not really even see theoretically inflected studies of minority writers until the 1980s, and American resistance to sophisticated theoretical reflection about the social construction of race remains very strong in the 1990s; our culture’s instinctive view of race remains essentialist. Furthermore, the rapid growth of the theory industry—which has dominated literary scholarship for over twenty years—has produced numerous theoretical subfields whose advocates no longer attempt to remain current across the whole spectrum of theory. Thus many American theorists avoid reading the anti-essentialist race theory that would teach them much about themselves and their country. That is not, however, to offer anti-essentialism unqualified praise. Reading Derrida alone will not fill the cultural need I am addressing. Americans might, for example, read the anti-essentialist race theory growing out of the British cultural studies tradition and then ask how it can be rearticulated to the specifities of American history.1
In an intellectual environment where different versions of feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and cultural studies intersect and compete for our commitment, therefore, does the unitary term “theory” have any meaning? As a reactive way of collapsing the whole range of theoretical discourses into a single (and thereby more avoidable) identity, the term may reasonably still be regarded with a degree of exasperation. Yet at the same time, teachers and scholars do continue to describe themselves as being “in theory,” thereby at least situating themselves within a particular historical conjuncture, but it is increasingly difficult thereby to evoke the possibility of identifying themselves with a loose alliance of contemporary intellectual movements. Departments occasionally advertise for specialists in theory and talk of teaching courses in theory, a conversation in which phenomenology, deconstruction, narratology, postmodernism, and other bodies of theory all seem more or less interchangeable, but in the 1990s the universal category has widely been abandoned for more specific searches and courses. The collapsing of differences that was characteristic of the seventies and to some degree of the eighties clearly blocked the comprehension of theories on their own terms and made theory intellectually imaginable to some only as a generalized other. But at the same time it prevented the policing of theory by those uninterested in its specificity, leaving it altogether up to those involved to decide the content of theory courses. However simplified the global term may be, then, it has a historical existence and a certain practical power in our lives.
Especially in the 1980s several of the multiple discourses or bodies of theory have been strikingly in dialogue with one another and, as a result, have been partly defined by the process of adapting to, incorporating, rejecting, or transforming one another’s insights, assumptions, and challenges. Thus there is arguably an implicit discursive field called theory, constantly in flux, that is structured by these affirmations and disputations. No individual discourse can realistically hope either to represent or wholly to occupy that field. Nor are the boundaries of the discursive field universally agreed on. What counts as theoretical and what counts as theoretically important are very much open to dispute. Some discourses may be acknowledged as theoretically inflected and informed without being widely credited as contributing to the continuing articulation of theoretical problematics. Some polemical and politically oppositional texts, on the other hand, though not engaged with the discourses that count as theoretical within the academy, nonetheless are implicitly theoretically grounded and certainly able to contribute to theoretical self-definition and critique. Some writers in the 1980s spoke of high and low theory to differentiate between what they considered more and less rhetorically sophisticated theoretical discourses or even to differentiate between theoretical writing and self-consciously stylized, deliberately chosen social practices, which might include the oppositional music, literature, rhetoric, or dress styles of particular subcultures. Others would consider such a distinction elitist or reactionary.
Are there, however, any characteristics common to all these theories and intellectual processes? At other moments in history, a theory has been taken to imply a finite set of logically related propositions. In the current historical context, with its wide disputation even within individual bodies of theory and its pervasive assumption that no theory can acquire permanent, ahistorical truth content, theory has a rather different status. For us, in the wake of the poststructuralist revolution, what probably most distinguishes theoretical from nontheoretical discourse is its tendency toward self-conscious and reflective interpretive, methodological, and rhetorical practices. This tendency, of course, is not unqualified. Self-reflection is not a condition that theory can decisively enter into and maintain. It is an intermittent element of various discursive practices, one made possible by particular historical pressures. Indeed, what is recognized and credited as genuine self-reflection will itself change over time, just as the available forms of self-reflection are themselves historically produced and constrained. Nonetheless, theoretical writing now typically assumes that meaning is not automatically given, that it must be consciously produced by a critical writing practice, that methodological, epistemological, and political choices and determinations are continually at issue in critical analysis.
From this perspective it is possible to see that a particular discursive tradition—say, New Criticism—could be genuinely theoretical at one point in its history and not at another. When a body of theory ceases to be in crisis, when
