Introduction

A journal issue titled "Vicissitudes of Theory" derives its saliency from the course taken by theory in recent years. The institutionalization of literary and cultural theory in the last three decades or so can be viewed as a movement through a series of phases and developments.

Speaking very generally, the initial crystallization of critical and cultural theory in the area of literary studies took the form of a 1960s and 1970s reception of several movements, the most prominent being structuralism and poststructuralism (whose provenance was mainly French), hermeneutics (German in inspiration), psychoanalytic criticism, feminist theory, Marxist theory, black studies, cultural studies (primarily British in origin), and certain strands of continental European philosophy (the work of the Frankfurt school and phenomenology being perhaps the most prominent).

In the 1980s a second phase of this institutionalization saw five significant developments. First, there were transformations within the above-mentioned movements, as black studies became African American studies, cultural studies took on a more recognizably North American cast, and so on. Second, these movements were augmented (in some cases, at any rate); thus a reworked American pragmatism became a feature of the philosophical landscape in relation to literary studies, cultural studies engaged with the writings of historians from the Indian subaltern studies group, and so forth. Third, there were fusions and overlaps between movements and paradigms, as theoretical rapprochements were brought about between, for example, feminism and psychoanalytic theory, poststructuralism and American pragmatism, African American studies and poststructuralism, and Marxism and feminist theory. Fourth, new subfields emerged within critical and cultural theory to join their already established counterparts, postcolonial theory and queer theory being perhaps the most notable of these. Fifth, there was an appropriation of work in some of these subfields by practitioners belonging to other disciplines For instance, cultural anthropologists began to engage with cultural studies; historians, with poststructuralism; economists, with rhetorical studies; and theologians, with feminist theory.

The 1990s saw yet other developments. With the availability of a substantial body of commentary and interpretive studies built up over two or more decades, the reception of these paradigms and movements itself could now become an object of study. Thus it was possible to study not just the writings of Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, and Simone de Beauvoir, say, but also the explication and elaboration of their work by later generations of scholars. Hand in hand with this study of the reception of such thinkers and the traditions associated with them were attempts to use the new intellectual tools available in cultural and critical theory to understand these thinkers' formations and the conditions that made their thought possible. A new theoretically informed kind of intellectual biography was one result of this development. In addition, very new theoretical objects became the focus of attention in some subfields. Recent developments in cybernetic and information technologies have made hypertext into a new object of study for those working in cultural studies, and nearly every subfield has had to deal with the phenomenon of globalization (involving among other things reflection on the character of the state, nationalism, the persistence of collective memory, the role of women in "third world" industrial production, diaspora as the experience of massive dislocations, etc.). Another development has been the study of the constitution of intellectual fields in terms of their social and cultural conditions of possibility, as science, economics, art history, legal theory, and historiography became objects of study by practitioners working in these fields as well as in critical and cultural theory. Finally, the 1990s saw the consolidation of a trend that had begun the decade before. With the exception of the creative arts, intellectual traffic and migration between the United States and the European countries had pretty much followed a one-way street from the latter to the former. Facilitated in part by this reception of European thinkers in the United States, a U.S. movement toward Europe became possible, as American or American-domiciled intellectuals moved to European countries (albeit in small numbers, one thinks here of such...