Published: December 14, 2003
n April, the academic journal Critical Inquiry convened what it called an ''intellectual town meeting'' at the University of Chicago to debate a question that was weighing heavily on the minds of humanities professors across the country. Was it true, the journal wanted to know, that ''the great era of theory'' -- that is, literary and cultural theory -- ''is now behind us''? In the 1970's and 80's, legions of students and professors in humanities departments embraced the view that the world was a ''text'' -- that the personal and political were shaped by language and that literary and cultural critics possessed tools as powerful as those of, say, political scientists for understanding the world and effecting social change. While outside observers have long inveighed against theory's abstruse argot and political pretensions, this year theory seems to have lost much of its cachet, even among its would-be defenders.
Several of the academic luminaries at the conference in Chicago challenged or minimized claims for theory's relevance. With considerable sarcasm, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of the African-American studies department at Harvard, announced: ''I missed the day theory was politically transformative. I'm too young.'' Likewise, Mary Poovey, an English professor at New York University, conceded that thoughtful, methodical scholarship rarely has an immediate effect on politics, and counseled, ''That's O.K.''
Even Terry Eagleton, a former Oxford professor whose classic 1983 primer, ''Literary Theory,'' introduced a generation of students to the field, broke ranks this year. In ''After Theory,'' published in Britain in September, Eagleton recalls the thrilling early days when theory ''seemed so obviously the herald to a new future, a land of boundless possibility.'' Yet now, he continues, ''quietly spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries,'' fancying themselves radical as they decode the political subtext of television shows.
Finally, in a move seemingly designed to underscore theory's frivolousness and political irrelevance, Slavoj Zizek, an ebullient star in the field, wrote theoretically inflected catalog copy for the ''Back to School 2003'' issue of the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly.
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