Heyday

It must have been in the early 1980s that a colleague told me about an interesting conversation with an undergraduate. The student had come to my colleague's office hours, and had asserted, forcefully, that the English department needed more courses in theory. My colleague, quite positively inclined toward this idea, nodded encouragingly. There ensued a short pause. Then the student spoke again, less forcefully, but with an intensity that was now palpably combined with entreaty. "What's theory?"

"We need more theory." "What's theory?" The earnest question was an intellectual cry—manifestly not, at the time, a pre-professional one. It had to do with courses in English departments. People were talking about theory. It was hot, it was mysterious, it was contestatory. We definitely needed it.

________

One of the most significant "institutions of theory" during these years was the English Institute. Founded in 1939, the English Institute met initially at Columbia University before it moved to Cambridge and to the Harvard University campus, where it remained until a few years ago. It now travels among three campuses, at Yale, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Irvine. My own connection with the Institute began when I gave my first paper there in the 1970s. I was a member of the Board of Supervisors and then a Trustee of the organization for many years. So I've had an opportunity to watch it develop during a time when theory became a key part of literary studies.

I will focus my observations here on the English Institute, but I will mention, as well, a few other such "institutions" in this period that will help to tell the story.

I'll divide my remarks into three sections, entitled, respectively, "Heyday," "Payday," and "Mayday."

Heyday

"The stage or period when excited feeling is at its height; the height, zenith or acme of anything which excites the feelings; the flush or full bloom, or stage of fullest vigour, of youth, enjoyment, prosperity, or the like."

—OED (hey-day, heyday, n., sense 2)

"Heyday" is a term often employed, with varying degrees of nostalgia, to refer to a time that is past. Thus we can read in the New York Times of "the Heyday of Snowboarding" (Tobey 2016); of the heyday of Pop Art in the 1960s (Johnson 2017); of Time magazine's attempt to "Plot a Future Beyond Its Heyday"; and of "Recapturing [New York City's] College Basketball Heyday" (Tracy 2017).

This is a good description of the feeling that prevailed at the English Institute during the time of theory's expansion into the intellectual life of the academy, from, let us say, the seventies to the nineties. Not that the Institute's prominence or influence began there—quite to the contrary.

From its inception, the English Institute—initially a group of literary scholars who wanted to meet in a smaller and more intensive forum than that of the Modern Language Association—brought to the fore theorists and scholars who would change the field of literary studies and literary theory, over and over again. It's worth recalling that when the Institute began, academic literary conferences were few and far between. The heyday of the "conference era" had not arrived. For many people, the EI was the alternative to the much larger, and more diffuse, MLA.

The literary theorists who spoke at the Institute in the 40s and 50s included, among others, W. K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Lionel Trilling, Northrop Frye, Leslie Fielder, and M.H. Abrams. If this group sounds a little parochial, a little Ivy-League-y or East-Coast-y, and more than a little white and male, that was the Institute—and that was to a large extent the North American theory lineup, in those years. That was also, lest we forget, the predominant makeup of senior professors in English department faculties. But the next generations would change that, and much else, about both "theory" and The English Institute. Women like Carolyn Heilbrun, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Susan Gubar, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Hortense Spillers, Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak were among the many...