Cultural Criticism or Textual Theory?

Abstract

Gradually and unevenly, 'theory' is coming to a position of dominance in Canadian departments of English (and also other departments of literature, especially French). The traditionalists are tiring (or retiring); some are belatedly converting, others negotiating a wary truce with doctrines that filled them with indignation fifteen years ago. Then, they hoped that 'theory' was simply a passing fad they could afford to wait out; now, they accept that it's here to stay, at least for some time. So now, instead of Tillyard and Willey, Wimsatt and Brooks, the authorities to cite are Freud and Nietzsche, Foucault and Bourdieu, Lacan and Derrida. We've moved from 'background' to 'foregrounding,' from 'order' to 'subversion,' from 'work' to 'text'—in sum, from Bate to Barthes. The new-model English professor is much more sophisticated, more European, more philosophical, more radical—yet also somehow more professional—than the 1960 version. Bold talk about 'subversion' and 'transgression' is combined with marked deference to academic authority, professional structures, and big-name theoreticians. A new figure—the Theorist—has emerged alongside the traditional Scholar and has largely ousted the Scholar's old antagonist, the urban Intellectual. A cluster of assumptions and styles I am calling 'textual theory' has taken over much of the ground once occupied by the kind of general, free-ranging cultural criticism produced by people who identified themselves as 'intellectuals'—a kind of criticism that urgently needs reviving now against the growing hegemony of 'theory.'