Why Today's Publishing World Is Reprising the Past

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By JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS

Literary theory seems caught in a holding pattern. Instead of the heady manifestoes and rampant invention of the late 1960s through the early 80s, it has turned retrospective. This turn says something about the state of literary criticism, as well as the humanities and the university today.

One sign of the retrospective stance is a wave of reprints, notably a cluster of anniversary editions. Two of them, published last year, provide bookends for the heyday of theory. The Johns Hopkins University Press reissued (with a glossy, brightened orange cover) the 40th-anniversary edition of The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, a collection of papers from a legendary conference at Hopkins in 1966 (it was actually the 41st anniversary, but literary critics aren't mathematicians).

The conference is often taken as inaugurating the theoretical turn in criticism that brought the newest developments in French theory to the American academy. Among the speakers was a who's who of semiotic, structuralist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic critics, who aimed to make humanistic fields more scientific, on the model of linguistics. To gain knowledge of the novel, for instance, one would abstract the general structure of plots as a physicist might adduce the law of gravity from falling objects.

The conference also introduced to the American scene a young philosopher, Jacques Derrida, whose paper, the last on the program, showed how structuralism, which held that we construct meaning from oppositions like nature and culture, deconstructed itself. Ten years later, the American translation of his Of Grammatology — which argued, among other things, that signs don't point to stable meanings but spin off into indeterminacy, and was pitched in a difficult, speculative idiom — changed the way that literary scholars responded to works and wrote criticism.

Also in 2007, the University of Chicago Press reissued (with a tanned, matte cover) the 20th-anniversary edition of Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History, which had been quickly deemed the standard history of the discipline when it first appeared. Graff, then a professor at the University of Chicago, and now at the University of Illinois at Chicago and president of the Modern Language Association, traced the formation of English departments from the late 19th century up to the theory era and showed how literary studies developed through conflicts between traditional practitioners of scholarship and advocates of new kinds of criticism. Although Graff had reservations about theory, he tacitly defended it, casting it not as a dangerous aberration but as a further step in the march of criticism.

Alongside those reprints, over the past few years there has been a stream of revamped editions, individually or in series such as Routledge Classics or Verso's Radical Thinkers. They include the 30th-anniversary edition of the British critic Terry Eagleton's early template for Marxist criticism and his most concerted theoretical statement, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (1976, 2006); the groundbreaking survey by Jonathan D. Culler, the leading expositor of theory, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975, 2002); its sequel, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (1982, 25th anniversary ed. 2007); the restoration of Marxism to the study of the novel by Duke University's Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981, 2002), which issued the famous call to "always historicize"; and Gayatri Spivak's In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987, 2006), which created a postcolonial and feminist perspective in poststructuralism that made her reputation for years. There are many other reissues as well.

Of course, some books have large sales through sustained course adoptions and crossover appeal, like Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983, 1996, 2008) or Edward W. Said's Orientalism (1978, 1995, 2003). Those have always been reprinted. But the current crop is different.

The aforementioned inventory was made up of all noteworthy books when they came out, so it is not entirely surprising that they remain in print, at least for their historical value. What is surprising is that most of them were decidedly academic, not crossover works, and they bear the marks of their moment. It is especially surprising that they remain relatively unsupplanted, given the short life cycle of academic scholarship. For example, Culler's Structuralist Poetics harks back to methods that were displaced by deconstruction, and Eagleton later distanced himself from the impulse of Criticism and Ideology, remarking in 1990 that it reflected the fetish of the 1970s for finding an overarching method. Many of the recent reissues feel dated.

The retrospective turn is particularly startling compared with the stance of the theorists toward criticism of the previous era. They consciously superseded it, rarely dealing with it substantively, consigning it to the dustbin of history. By the 1970s, critical classics that ruled a dec-ade or two before, like Cleanth Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and William K. Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon (1954), were barely read, except perhaps as examples of the limitations of their authors' generation. The central books of the more politically cognizant New York intellectuals, like Lionel Trilling's Liberal Imagination (1950), went out of print. Earlier standards might have been recognized as part of the history of criticism, like Samuel Johnson's or Matthew Arnold's statements, but they had little bearing on the excited present of theory.

When I was in graduate school, in the late 1980s, we did not read Trilling, or his fellow New Yorker Irving Howe, on politics and the novel, but Jameson and J. Hillis Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The era of theory was presentist, its stance forward-looking. Now it seems to have shifted to memorializing its own past.

The case is not unlike that of contemporary music, and one explanation might be the zeitgeist. Arising in the 60s, it was the rock 'n' roll of criticism, dispensing with the Guy Lombardos of the previous generation. Brooks and company were the music of your parents, pleasant, humane, respectful of tradition; theory wanted to blow things up. It was loud, pitched against the straitjacket of the canon, Western metaphysics, phallocentrism, racial stereotypes, and normative sex.

Today, however, theory is more like the eclectic mix one might find on your students' (or your own) iPods, suiting your mood at the moment: some Jameson along with Andrew Ross, maybe an oldie from Arnold along with Judith Butler, and a classic like Aristotle for background music. (I'd speculate that a key reason for the contemporary success of Slavoj Zizek, the indefatigable Slovenian theorist, is his talent as a DJ, sampling a wide itinerary of theory.)

In that frame, the stream of reprints is like the remastered boxed sets of the Beatles or Ramones. No doubt it's better to have them than not, and often they come in crisp new packages (the Verso remixes are particularly striking in design and feel). But they are no longer the events they were when they were published.

The zeitgeist now seems perceptibly different. Less heady, with less a sense of possibility and more a sense of the weight of the past. But the zeitgeist gives only a very broad explanation, a mist that hangs over the landscape, tinting everything in its path, but hard to see close up. It might characterize a cultural mood, but it doesn't explain the concrete specifics.

A more scholarly explanation might look to the sociology of knowledge and see the stasis of criticism in terms of Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to Kuhn, science does not proceed by a steady progress, as we tend to assume; most practice at any one time is relatively static, operating according to a general framework or paradigm. Intellectual work tends to plateau and pond; it changes only when too much pressure builds, and then it breaks in a waterfall. Kuhn called the waterfalls "scientific revolutions" and the plateaus "normal science."

Perhaps we are in a period of "normal science," after the cascade of theory. That makes some sense, but one reservation is that the sciences and literary criticism have different protocols of evidence, testing, and proof, and different histories of advancement. They are ahistorical disciplines (you don't see many physicists building their arguments from Aristotle), while literary criticism is still a historical discipline. The main textbooks, for example, are compendiums of past work, whereas in the sciences they are synopses of the present state of knowledge. That is because you can usually pinpoint an underlying paradigm at a given time in a science, whereas literary studies draws on a concatenation of theoretical models; it would be as if some physicists were Newtonian, some Einsteinian, some theosophists, some string theorists, and some just stubborn.

Another reservation I have is that paradigms explain how things work in fields, yielding intradisciplinary accounts of knowledge. Kuhn's insight was to point to the way science progresses through groups of scientists rather than just individuals. But he is more focused on the ideas within a discipline than on the social factors that make the institutions that house disciplines; he leaves unanswered the question of what puts the scientists (or critics) there.

There's a revealing throwaway comment in the new preface to The Structuralist Controversy, noting that the 1966 Hopkins conference occurred thanks to a $30,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. That would be $200,000 in current dollars. Excluding the lottery, it is hard to imagine that one could today garner a $30,000 grant, much less one of six digits, for a meeting on the latest developments in criticism.

The support from Ford was not a blip but the result of the policy and practice of the post-World War II university, and I think it points to a more concrete explanation for the rise of theory. Particularly after Sputnik and the enacting of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the university experienced what historians call its golden age. Academe received unprecedented support, in spirit as well as financing, and its charge tipped from teaching to producing research to bolster America's position as a leader in the world.

New money went not only to the sciences but also to the humanities. "One of the primary purposes of the NDEA was to stimulate the study of modern foreign languages," the American Council on Education reported in 1962. In that milieu, English and particularly comparative-literature departments experienced unprecedented plenty and encouraged speculative research. They hired and trained scholars positioned to embrace the new intellectual currents from Europe.

That is not to say that theory was an inevitable result, but that federal, state, and foundation financing created the conditions for it to flourish. Theory provided a rationale for advanced research, beyond the previous generation's orientation toward "practical criticism" — doing "readings" of individual works — which had its roots in teaching.

Ideas might have their own history, but they ebb and flow according to their material context. Criticism, like the arts and most other species of culture, ebbs and flows with the tides of its patronage.

The retrospective turn fits our time of shrunken support for the humanities. Some literary critics in the theory generation, like Stanley Fish, have suggested that the current conceptual shrinkage has come about because no worthy heirs have appeared to take the place of the intellectual giants of his generation. But the current generation subsists on pinched diets, with less than a third of academics in languages and literatures, according to a recent report by the MLA, holding secure, tenure-track jobs. It is a somewhat bitter irony that, for all their radical panache, those in the theory generation rarely turned their revolutionary fervor and relentless interrogations to the situation of academic labor.

Departing from the wild speculation and heady pronouncements of the theory years, one of the few distinctive new strands in recent criticism focuses on academic labor. Criticism may be constrained by its material conditions, but sometimes it can bite back. Especially if you don't feed it.

Jeffrey J. Williams, a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, is one of the editors of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001, second edition in preparation). He is finishing a book on the history of modern criticism.