<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <title></title> </head> <body> John Adams wrote: <blockquote type="cite" cite="mid21461620.1132283142308.JavaMail.root@mswamui-billy.atl.sa.earthlink.net"> <pre wrap="">The Death of Literary Theory </pre> </blockquote> is summed up in "on its way to producing a new generation of lawyers and engineers and surgeons (and risk arbitrageurs and pharma lobbyists), was it so wrong for a university to indulge one department whose time was spent agonizing over the entire mission of knowledge production itself? By never firmly establishing what it itself was for, the English department cultivated habits of withering self-reflection and so became one mechanism by which the university could stay in touch with its nonutilitarian self and subject its own practices to ongoing critique. Did the theory era produce bullshit by the mountain-load? Of course it did. But by allowing "literary theory" to turn into a pundit's byword, signifying the pompous, the outmoded, the shallow, the faddish, we may have quietly resolved the argument over what a university is for in favor of no self-reflection whatsoever." Lots of problems with this essay. First, the English department was a haven for the intellectually curious long before literary theory became fashionable. I myself went into graduate school in English because I didn't like the "History of Ideas" and "Intellectual History" programs that were available in the early seventies, but basically I was interested in the generation of ideas/genres/forms and how these reflected the societies in which they were formed -- something that Marx made me aware of. The English department had always given students a lot of latitude....and so it did me. I was able to look at all this stuff without Derrida, but with a fair amount of elbow grease and scholarship. Second, if you really want a nonutilitarian education, forget English; try Latin or Ancient Greek. No ulterior motives there, believe me. Third, the "self-reflecting" practices of theory were anyting but. This reflection included nothing about the generation of jobs, status, and values in the English dept itself, which would be the first object of such reflection. All it did was to literalize certain metaphors (principally of the text) and apply them to lots of stuff with great abandon. No discipline, no clarity; just the opposite: a wellspring of obscurantist jargon that made us the laughingstock of the academy. Is it over now? Good! Joanna <blockquote type="cite" cite="mid21461620.1132283142308.JavaMail.root@mswamui-billy.atl.sa.earthlink.net"> <pre wrap=""> </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>