Monday, December 15, 2003
Death of Theory[?]
Things always have to come to such an unceremonious end, don't they?In the 1970's and 80's, legions of students and professors in humanities departments embraced the view that the world was a ''text'' -- that the personal and political were shaped by language and that literary and cultural critics possessed tools as powerful as those of, say, political scientists for understanding the world and effecting social change. While outside observers have long inveighed against theory's abstruse argot and political pretensions, this year theory seems to have lost much of its cachet, even among its would-be defenders.Considering how theory was treated by a lot of the old-guard professors at my university, I'm inclined to call for a murder investigation.
posted by Jeff 12/15/2003
