Ode To a Lost Decade

Terry Eagleton controversially pronounced the death of literary theory in his 2003 book, After Theory, which claimed that cultural theory “was there to remind the traditional left what it had flouted: art, pleasure, gender, power, sexuality, language….the family, the body, the ecosystem…ethnicity, life-style, hegemony.” His influential and disputed theses were soon followed by Daphne Patai’s 2005 Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. Pronounced a “book you’re not supposed to read” by Elizabeth Kantor, Patai’s anthology attempts to explain Theory’s ascendance and subjects the discipline’s claims to “careful scrutiny.”

However, critics the “death of Theory” argue that the movement remains relevant today. Professor Phillip Wegner characterized the 1990’s as a “moment of sublime beauty” and the advent of a time of “openness and convincability [sic], of experimentation and opportunity, of conflict and security.” “The 1990’s witnessed a major transformation in the discourse of theory, with the rise of new figures, a shift in the works of others, and a new sexuality,” said the University of Florida professor. In contrast, he asserts, the death of Theory arguments serve as part of a “larger cultural process…of forgetting the 1990’s.” Wegner has been published in journals such as Cultural Critique, Utopian Studies, The Comparatist, and Rethinking Marxism.

Ironically, Professor Wegner openly admitted to what many conservatives heretofore suspected: multiculturalism, gender studies, ethnography, and other disciplines operate under an ideologically-uniform agenda. “I would maintain that Theory is only one avatar of a family of critical approaches, and has similar tasks which often slide silently into each other and get lumped together: historicism, cultural studies, interdisciplinarity, multiculturalism, and political criticism, all of which participate in a common project and expertise…,” he said. Wegner described the process by which literary theory teaches us to first deconstruct Shelly, then remove Shelly from the English curriculum, and, ultimately, shift from “hiring Shelly experts” into “those whose work focuses on African… literatures, globalization, or queer theory.”

Last December,
Wegner told a standing-room only Modern Language Association (MLA) audience in Chicago that he views September 11, 2001 as a “non-event,” that has meaning which “cannot be reduced to an ordinary description.” “In brief, I argue in my book that no event occurred on 9/11,” Wegner said. Rather, he argues, “9/11 is a repetition of an earlier event…an encounter with the traumatic real that occurs on November 11, 1989.” In other words, these “two deaths”—the fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11—serve as bookmarks on a “distinct historical period” of 1990’s cultural exploration.

However, this academic utopia is under attack by a conservative post-post-modernism which embraces universalist ideals, Wegner argues. “While unified between otherwise quite disparate projects, is the dialectical return of many of these categories in regards to postmodern theory, including totality, ontology, universalism, truth and utopia,” he said (emphasis added). He continued, “These projects thus mark an authentic negation of the negation, a post-post-modernism, as it were, with the beginning of a movement beyond the epitomies of the postmodern and a return to the radical transformative energy of a new modernism.”

This movement is inherently antagonistic against academic community, Wegner argues, and features “a full-blown conservative political movement bolstered by such institutions as Campus Watch and the American Counsel of Trustees and Alumni.” In addition, Wegner believes that proponents of the death of Theory “provide comfort for the attacks on academic freedom and what can and cannot be expressed in the classroom.” He added, “And it is in these efforts that, in the present moment at least, our common enemies have not ceased to be victorious.”

Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.