by
Mnet
on Tue 28 Jun 2005 02:01 PM BST
Butterflies and Wheels- Theory’s Empires
This spring, Columbia University Press published an anthology of literary and cultural theory, a 700-page tome entitled Theory’s Empire and edited by Daphne Patai and Will Corral. The collection includes essays dating back 30 years, but most of them are of recent vintage (I’m one of the contributors).
Why another door-stopper volume on a subject already well-covered by anthologies and reference books from Norton, Johns Hopkins, Penguin, University of Florida Press, etc.? Because in the last 30 years, theory has undergone a paradoxical decline, and the existing anthologies have failed to register the change. Glance at the roster of names and texts in the table of contents and you’ll find a predictable roll call of deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, neopragmatism, postcolonial studies, and gender theory. Examine the approach to those subjects and you’ll find it an expository one, as if the job of the volumes were to lay out ideas and methods without criticism (except when one school of thought in the grouping reproves another). The effect is declarative, not “Here are some ideas and interpretations to consider” but “Here is what theorists say and do.”
