Theory and the Changing Forms of Institutional Prestige

In order to understand the institutional history of theory, it is necessary to consider those institutional sites, both central and marginal, in which theory found a home and exercised its influence. It is my contention that three major sites have been critical to the history of theory within the academy: the academic department, the summer institute, and, increasingly, the Humanities Center or Institute. In what follows, I will discuss primarily the extra-departmental sites, since in some ways I think they have been the most significant sites of theory's propulsive role in academic culture in the humanities. And I will use the School of Criticism and Theory (SCT) as the key example of the summer institute, since it has played a dominant role for many decades, and since many institutes that followed in its wake explicitly modeled their programs on the SCT.

The history of theory within the U.S. dates back to the 1960s and encompasses several interrelated schools of thought, among them poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, narratology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, critical race studies, postcolonialism, queer theory, post-humanism, speculative materialism, and the new vitalism. At the same time it is also closely linked to the auratic power of charismatic thinkers and texts, and the relation between charisma and argument is a key element in its story, and an interesting sociological feature of theory's rise and transformations (see Anderson 2009).

There are varying stories about theory's emergence, internal conflicts, and transformations, as well as ongoing discussions about whether or not it does or should exert the force it once did. In Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, Joseph North notes that most accounts of theory emphasize the influence of 1968 on the thinking of a generation of scholars who welcomed new intellectual frameworks and effectively politicized the discipline, which had been defined at the mid-century by the conservative forces of the New Criticism. I will focus today on the question of institutionality and especially its relation to the practice of theory, rather than making the case for any specific intellectual-cum-political history, though of course some aspects of the story I tell will be relevant to the question of theory's intellectual transformations over time.

The SCT was founded in 1976 at Irvine, by the literary scholars Murray Krieger and Hazard Adams, with the aim of creating an extra-institutional forum for the discussion of new forms of theory, mainly continental, which were influencing humanistic scholarship in the U.S., in particular departments of literature. In "The School of Criticism and Theory: An Allegorical History," Krieger notes that he and Adams modeled the summer institute on a venture integrally allied with the New Criticism, the Kenyon School of English, founded in the late 1940s by John Crowe Ransom and including among its senior fellows F.O. Matthieson, and Lionel Trilling. The Kenyon School of English, later the School of Letters at Indiana, sought to create a critical space of freedom outside of the constraints of institutionalized historical literary scholarship and, while at Kenyon, outside of the professional pressures obtaining at institutions with doctoral programs. It was deliberately located at a liberal arts college to disable the influence of professional graduate training associated with historical scholarship as opposed to criticism. It's a little odd to think of New Criticism as a rogue venture, forced outside the walls of the institution, since it so often figures in disciplinary narratives as a consolidating pedagogical practice meant to simplify the teaching of literature and fundamentally conservative in its refusal to consider historical and political context when interpreting works of art. The Kenyon School originated in opposition to an interesting constellation of approaches, one we probably wouldn't think to group together today: philological, historical, and ideological approaches. Its mission statement included the following:

The educational policy of the School turns on the belief that the usual college and university courses in English have not discharged their responsibility for the art which is in their keeping…They expend very nearly their entire energy upon disciplines which are philological, historical, biographical, and ideological…able students are...