Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide ed. by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman (review)

Compiling an anthology such as the 2012 Johns Hopkins Guide to literary and cultural theory is a thankless task: the deluge of relevant materials necessitates the kinds of editorial decisions that are bound to disappoint as much as to gratify. What is gratifying about this guide are the expert entries on “classics” such as Freud, Saussure, Barthes, de Man, Derrida, and Said. But what is rather disappointing is that the anthology manages to give the impression that theorizing stopped circa 1999. Though many of the summaries of individual critics who are still writing – such as Alain Badiou – are relatively up to date, the same cannot be said about some of the more topical entries, such as those on African-American criticism, ethics, feminist theory, gender, multiculturalism, post-colonial studies, race and ethnicity, and queer theory. These fields have produced such a massive amount of new work in the last fifteen years that it is difficult to justify the emphasis on texts published prior to 2000.

Take queer theory. I teach a graduate seminar in the field, for which my rule is to assign only texts published during the last decade. I could easily write at least three different syllabi that would meet this criterion, yet none of the landmark texts I would use – say, Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages, Heather Love’s Feeling Backward, Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, David Eng’s The Feeling of Kinship, or Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure – make it into the queer theory entry of the anthology. Likewise, the bibliographies under “feminist theory and criticism” list only one text published after 1998. This being the case, the editors’ conviction that the volume “will answer most of the questions that occur to teachers, students, and others as they traverse the contemporary critical and theoretical landscape” seems somewhat exaggerated.

The editors tell us that the anthology is intended for readers who “do not have specialized knowledge” in literary and cultural theory. But I would say that the readers most likely to benefit from this volume are those who already know the lay of the land. A novice to theory might be confused by something as basic as the alphabetical (rather than chronological) ordering of the anthology’s entries. Such a reader might find it jarring to jump from Adorno to African-American theory to Agamben, or from Gates to gender to Gilroy to globalization to Gramsci to Greenblatt. Likewise, mixing entries on individual critics with entries on theoretical approaches creates a somewhat chaotic overall texture. I can imagine a student profiting from this anthology in the context of a survey course in which a professor provides the necessary historical background. But trying to wade through the terrain “between Adorno and Žižek” – as the anthology’s back cover, in a fit of alphabetical imperialism, advertises it – without any guidance would be a challenging endeavour.

Moreover, some of the topical entries are so thin that they are more misleading than helpful for readers who do not possess enough expertise to read critically. For instance, the four-page entry on “post-Lacanians” implies that Lacan had nothing better to do than to celebrate patriarchy. Unfortunately, this is the Wikipedia version of Lacan – and of psychoanalysis generally speaking – that many students already possess. The problem of oversimplification is of course not specific to this anthology but is intrinsic to the very process of anthologization, so that it would be unfair to suggest that this anthology fails where others succeed. Rather, I would propose that it is impossible to get an anthology such as this “right,” which in turn raises the question why the academy is so eager to produce them. The problem, fundamentally, has nothing to do with the editors of – and even less with the contributors to – this volume but instead with the commodification of knowledge that is part and parcel of...