Tag: 09.07

“Theory in academic literary criticism seems to be playing itself out by the sheer force of its deep inner uselessness. Not a single significant book, nor any dazzling essays that I know of, have been produced in American literary criticism that are owing to their author’s adaptation of one or another kind of critical theory, imported or domestic, from deconstruction to queer theory. Such stuff continues to be taught, as it was taught to the people now teaching it and who themselves consequently know little else to teach. But one senses that the day of the predominance of theory in English departments is coming to a close: the fever has abated, the flame is guttering. Derrida and Foucault are no longer fighting but yawn-inducing words.”

“Once, we are told, a hardy species of freelance thinker roamed the landscape of the American mind. This breed was independent, fiercely so. It practiced social and cultural criticism but never used jargon, and its accessible manner won a large audience. It prospered until not much later than the 1950s. Indeed, it is possible to speak of that decade as a kind of golden age. But then something happened. More particularly, the 1960s happened, and the 1970s– an era of disintegrating consensus, of proliferating theoretical schemata, of perverse refusals to follow the guiding example of one’s elders. Smart young people decided not to write well.”