"The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn't Matter"

A fascinating article from Saturday's New York Times:

These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century — psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism — have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating....

Finally, a young man with dreadlocks who said he was a graduate student from Jamaica asked, "So is theory simply just a nice, simple intellectual exercise, or something that should be transformative?"

Several speakers weighed in before Mr. Gates stood up. As far as he could tell, he said, theory had never directly liberated anyone. "Maybe I'm too young," he said. "I really didn't see it: the liberation of people of color because of deconstruction or poststructuralism."

If theory's political utility is this dubious, why did the theorists spend so much time talking about current events? Catharine R. Stimpson, a panelist and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University, offered one, well, theory. "This particular group of intellectuals," she said, "has a terror of being politically irrelevant."

Here's a clue for current "intellectuals" who went from grade school to high school to college to graduate school to tenure-tracked professoriates: Marxism never worked! (Except for the big-wigs who lived the high life while forcing everybody else to live the hard life.)

(Thanks, Justin.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/22/03 08:49:40 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.