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  • Literary Theory in the 21st Century: Theory Renaissance by Vincent B. Leitch
  • Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Vincent B. Leitch, Literary Theory in the 21st Century: Theory Renaissance New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, 174 pp.

Word on the street is that theory is dead—superseded by a multitude of studies. Gone are theory stallwarts such as deconstruction, Marxism, and feminism. They have been replaced by studies of everything and anything from Barbie dolls and Beyonce to biopolitics and books. One need go no further than the half-title page of Vincent Leitch’s latest book, Literary Theory in the 21st Century, for evidence of this.

Usually the first recto of a book consists only of the main title. Not even the subtitle or the author’s name appears. In Leitch’s new book, however, the first recto is a chart that maps literary theory and criticism in the twenty-first century. Leitch’s map consists of “94 subdisciplines and fields circling around 12 major topics” which the author parenthetically notes are “reminiscent of planets and satellites.” Of these ninety-four subdisciplines, fifty include adjectives followed by the noun “studies”: patronage, subaltern, working-class, debt, object, technoscience, animal, food, postcolonial, border, diaspora, new American, resistance, surveillance and security, body, cyborg, gender, disability, age, leisure, new Southern U.S., Whiteness, indigenous, ethnic, women’s, queer, masculinity, sexuality, celebrity, fashion, sport, gaming, sound, visual culture, tv, film, periodical, archive, professionalization, canonization, academic labor, literacy, composition, reception, performance, narrative, trauma, memory, and holocaust.

Another twenty clearly imply the noun “studies,” but for one reason or another it is not stated. For example, the field “media studies” has eight subdisciplines. All but three (“new media,” “social media,” and “book history”) include the noun “studies”—and for at least two of these (“new media” and “social media”) the noun “studies” is clearly implied. The final one, “book history,” is probably more accurate with “studies” replacing the noun “history.” Among the ninety-four subdisciplines, the noun “theory” is only used twice: in “cognitive theory” and “affect theory.”

Clearly, if Leitch is even somewhat accurate in his universal mapping of literary criticism in the twenty-first century, there is little or no room in the new millennium for the more dominant mapping of literary theory and criticism, namely, one which divides it into schools and movements. For Leitch, designators of the theory and criticism universe such as Russian formalism, New Criticism, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism, queer theory, New Historicism, and postcolonial theory are strictly twentieth-century phenomena. Though these designators were important to the emergence of “theory” in the last quarter of the twentieth-century, they have outlived their usefulness for mapping literary criticism in the twenty-first century. The explosion of “studies” in the first quarter [End Page 412] of the twenty-first century leaves little opportunity for organizing literary criticism into the older matrix of schools and movements. Or, alternately stated, studies as sub-species of the “twentieth-century” schools and movements makes for very messy and confusing mapping. Hence, why bother? Better to just leave it to the historians of theory to trace the legacies of theory amidst the “studies” multitude.

What then to do with “theory,” that is, the sum body of the twentieth-century’s schools and movements in the wake of the explosion of twentieth-first century studies? Leitch’s answer is somewhat surprising. Namely, dub the first quarter of the twenty-first century a “theory renaissance.” This is the somewhat counterintuitive task of his new book—a task which as difficult as it may sound is one for which he makes an incredibly strong case. In a nutshell, his argument is that all ninety-four subdisciplines and twelve major topics “stem directly from recognizable contemporary schools and movements of theory” (viii). Therefore, because there is no other term that adequately captures the “proliferation” charted into ninety-four subdisciplines and twelve major topics, we need to just continue to use the designator “theory.”

Indeed, Leitch’s response to what has been dubbed by others as the death of theory and the rise of studies, cultural and otherwise, is both pragmatic (we don’t have a better term to...

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