Response: The Institutional History of Theory and the Institutional History of Feminism

I agreed to serve as respondent for this cluster because I care very much about theory. Decades spent teaching theory courses and my work on the new MLA "Theory" Forum (which is sponsoring this panel) make me really appreciate Bill's and David's attempts to define "theory," their recognition that it still needs defining. I agreed to serve here as respondent also because of my investment in history, and in books—especially because of my interest in the intersection of theory, history, and books. Given that interest, I very much like Jeff's framing of the history of theory not as "a chain of ideas," or a "conversation," but as a "book history of theory," "the story of presses and editors" as well as authors, the institutional history of "the publishing apparatuses of theory." While our three papers raise a number of points that I would enjoy following up on, in the interest of keeping to MLA time constraints, my response here will restrict itself to two questions: the first is, we might say, theoretical; the second, historical.

Question 1: Bill's paper ended with this sentence: "I suppose that's just one more theory of the book." Bill here operates a classic theory chiasmus, inverting the implied "book of theory" (our topic here) into his final phrase "theory of the book." That in fact is my first question here today: in our discussion, in this "book history of theory," what, exactly, is a "book"?

Looking at our three talks, the answer is not so obvious, which is to say, it's a theoretical question. For instance, our third paper is about articles in a scholarly journal; David's paper is not in fact about books at all. The inclusion of David's paper on a "book history" panel suggests that the word "book" in our panel title does not have its usual, commonplace meaning.

Delineating our panel topic at the beginning of his talk, Jeff said that our "book history of theory" will look at "the books and journals and other publishing apparatuses of theory." In this formulation, "book" actually has two different meanings: it can represent the general category of "publishing apparatuses," but it also can be a subset of that category, distinguished for example from journals. Instead of dealing indiscriminately with these different publishing apparatuses, I want to focus on the distinction between journal articles and books. Jeff's paper, it turns out, discussed the relation between journal articles and books; and so did Bill's paper.

Jeff divided theory publishing into two separate periods. The first period involves the "founding and centrality of the theory journal"; the following period is characterized by anthologies. In Jeff's history of theory, journal articles came first, and then anthologies and "readers"; these latter two apparatuses are in fact books, but of a particular kind—textbooks, we might say. Looking at the anthologies, Jeff observed that "a majority of selections" in the theory anthologies were originally published in "journals rather than books." Jeff's studies of theory textbooks are a way to get at what sort of theory was institutionalized. And following Jeff, we note then that the institutionalization of theory would seem to privilege journal articles over books.

In sketching his brief book history of theory, Jeff remarked that the second period not only saw the proliferation of theory textbooks, but also "the forging and expansion of presses featuring theory, such as Routledge, Minnesota, Duke, and others, and book series such as Routledge's Thinking Gender… or Minnesota's History and Theory of Literature." Jeff's paper did not say anything else about these presses or book series, but this one sentence does point to what I thought we meant by theory "books," as well as gesturing toward Bill's participation on our panel (even citing Routledge twice in this sentence).

It was in Bill's paper that we actually heard a discussion of what I would call theory "books," what I expected from this so-called "book history of theory." But even as he focused on the theory book...