> Theory in chaos
> By David Kirby | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
>
> Postmodern literary theory is rooted in mid-century European
> philosophy, though it didn't begin to catch on in America until the
> late '60s; the Johns Hopkins University conference on "The Language of
> Criticism and the Sciences of Man" which featured Jacques Derrida and
> other master theoreticians took place in 1966 and is generally regarded
> as the theoretical equivalent of the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth Rock.
Not at all. The US had its own tradition of litcrit -- the New Critics. And this account leaves out existentialism, structuralism, semiotics, the Frankfurt School, and much else besides. It's amazing, how a crude anti-Gaullism is still the dominant perspective of the cultural Right.
> Henry Louis Gates Jr. - star Ivy League academic who was recently the
> object of a turf battle between Harvard and Princeton Universities - is
> soon to publish "The Third World of Theory," a book that promises not
> only to extend literary study into uncharted pluralist and
> multicultural domains but also, according to the current Oxford
> University Press catalog, offer "a unifying statement about the future
> of theory."
Skip Gates, to the rescue! Most of the really interesting theoretical work today is at the intersection of postmodernism/First World culture studies and postcolonialism/Third World culture studies. This is actually an amazing time to be a theorist -- there are multiple cultural revolutions happening in the EU and East Asia, the media and videogame cultures are going like gangbusters, etc.
> At the same time, Franco Moretti of Stanford University is raising
> academic eyebrows with what some are calling the ultimate
> "anti-theory,"
Moretti is a very fine theorist and critic. He's basically employing a variation of Bourdieu's notion of the habitus/field to literature -- very interesting stuff.
> The Duke University English department's spring courses include such
> homey-sounding subjects as "Victorian Literature," " 'Ulysses' and
> Irish Modernism," and "Music in Literature and Philosophy, 1800-1945."
Let's not overlook "Literature, Politics, and the New Imperialism": http://www.duke.edu/web/english/graduate/courses.htm
-- DRR