How New Literary History Became a Theory Journal

It's a very different discipline from the one into which Ralph launched NLH. In fact, its size and shape back then played a crucial role in that launch… Why, I asked him, did he choose literary study as the field to develop and deploy these tools? "Because," Ralph responded, "it's small." Beowulf to Virginia Woolf may have been intimidating to budding PhDs, but all of the texts we were supposed to know back then constituted a very manageable data set—one conducive to controlled experiments in the dynamics of kind.

—Clifford Siskin (2009)

In "The Rise of the Theory Journal," Jeffrey Williams argues that between 1969 and 1979, there arose a new kind of journal, the theory journal" and he mentions 17 examples, most of them based in literary studies (2009, 683). Williams' wide-ranging essay puts the theory journal in a broad historical context, including not only the history of literary magazines since the turn of the 20^th century, but also the more recent history of the American university. My own focus will be much narrower. I'm interested in the role of the theory journal in the academic discipline of English. My argument is that a new disciplinary practice, called "theory," emerged in the 1970s, and that an examination of the contents of New Literary History (NLH) over that decade reveals this. When NLH began in 1969, the word "theory" in the subtitle meant "literary theory," which I will define as a subfield that included meta-criticism and questions concerning the conditions of possibility of the study of literature. By the end its first decade, while the journal had not abandoned questions proper to literary theory, it had become a vehicle for theory, a project with a much larger agenda. The discussion that follows is based on a coding of all of articles published in NLH between 1969 and 1979 as either literary theory (or another recognizably literary project), theory, or other.

Journals have historically played a central role in academic disciplines. Disciplines, as I understand them, are not ancient traditions of knowledge, but socio-intellectual entities that emerge in the 18^th century and which come into their own as the research university becomes the dominant species of higher education in the 19^th century. Roger Geiger in his history of the American research university asserts, "If there is a single crucial point in the process of academic professionalization, it would be the formation of a national association with its attendant central journal" (1986, 22). The role of journals, especially central journals such PMLA, is to define what is proper to the discipline. This is achieved less by explicit rules than by example, as the journal publishes exemplars of disciplinary practice. From the early days of literary study, new journals appeared that defined subdisciplines. The first subdisciplines of the field of modern languages were those devoted to national languages and literatures. Thus English Literary History helped to define English. American literature didn't become a recognized subdiscipline until 1929, when American Literature appeared as the official publication of the American Literature Section of the MLA (Shumway 1994).

Theory never became a formal subdiscipline of English or any other discipline, but it did become a distinct disciplinary practice that might have become a subdiscipline under different circumstances. Theory, I will argue, is based in a new paradigm, while literary theory was rooted in one or another of previously established paradigms. Toril Moi observes that "poststructuralism" was used synonymously with "theory." "I use the term [poststructuralism] about theories and philosophies that build on Ferdinand de Saussure's vision of language, alone or in combination with continental philosophy. Structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction are names for different strands of this post-Saussurean tradition. 'Theory' or 'French theory' are other names for the same phenomenon" (2009, 802). The practice of theory included other traditions that were sometimes used in alignment with poststructuralism, but which might also be explicitly opposed to it. What distinguishes theory from literary theory is the ambition of the former to address questions that are not contained by the literary. The...