“Of course, you’re doing theory, right?” the woman next to me asked in one of my first graduate seminars in English. She was wearing a leather motorcycle jacket covered with zippers, and her orange hair was styled in dreadlocks. It was the early 90s.
“I guess that’s what we’re here for,” I said. I didn’t want to seem like a square, even though I was wearing tan khakis and a blue button-down shirt. “I’ll probably do something Foucauldian,” I said, with a hint of worldly boredom. I had heard of Foucault, and I grabbed his name like a piece of floating wreckage.
I didn’t really “do theory” as an undergraduate. I liked reading, and I didn’t like the idea of going into business. A distinguished university had offered me a graduate fellowship. And that was more attractive than the string of part-time, low-wage jobs that seemed to stretch off into the future without end.
My traditional undergraduate education in the “Western tradition” left me ill equipped to participate in English seminars that were mostly about contemporary politics through the lens of various theories. Familiar, canonical works did appear on syllabi, but they were usually incidental to the discussions that took place in seminars. I wanted to puzzle out the narrative complexities of Herman Melville and understand the prosody of Walt Whitman, but it seemed that most of my classmates only wanted to talk about how various approaches to texts might advance one or another set of progressive political interests.
I had just gone through 16 years of Roman Catholic schooling -- from first grade through college graduation. I had never even read Marx. My classmates might as well have been speaking a foreign language -- although, after a few years, I began to notice it was a language many of them understood imperfectly. Graduate seminars are often salted with loquacious poseurs whose knowledge of theory is little more than a collection of buzzwords and one-size-fits-all templates.
But that’s what graduate school in the 90s seemed to reward. Seminars rarely had examinations; the only requirements were participation and the submission of a final essay, written in the idiom of some school of theory that one had never been formally taught but was expected to know.
I often thought I was failing my classes, but somehow I seldom received anything lower than an “A.” (I soon realized how inflated graduate grades really are: the grad-school “A-" is equivalent to the GPA-crushing “C’s” I had received several times as an undergraduate in the business courses I had taken.)
Even if you were doggedly self-motivated, it was impossible to develop your scholarly methods in a conscientious manner. There was simply too much to learn. I was just becoming familiar with some of the ever-expanding literary canon -- and the historical and biographical contexts in which those works were embedded -- but it was simply assumed that everyone understood theory. Why else would anyone be in graduate school in the humanities?
Meanwhile, I was teaching for the first time (strangely, without any pedagogical training), preparing for two foreign-language examinations (mostly useless for an Americanist), working as a research assistant (good experience), and searching for venues to present and publish my badly written seminar papers (premature but demanded by the job market).
So, like many others, I learned how to fake it.
Theory became a kind of confidence trick: a means of reducing the impossible workload to a few catchphrases: “Puhleese, the author’s intentions are irrelevant here.” “Everything is political.” “There is nothing but the text.” They were like the applause lines used by politicians. And they always seemed to work in seminars.
All that was required, ultimately, was conformity with a set of political beliefs. No one would ask why the author’s intentions were irrelevant. I didn’t have enough mastery of the theoretical debates to ask. And I didn’t want to appear ignorant.
Besides, perfectly reasonable questions were often met with the “poor dear, you need mental help” stare from people who had no explanations other than dogma. I learned to just bob my head sagely and hum in affirmation to things I only half understood. For all its avowed radicalism, Theory seemed to stifle the possibility of dialogue at the time in my life when I most needed it. When anyone can take offense at anything, the safest thing to be is silent or incomprehensible.
What graduate student has not felt the chill of failing to grasp someone’s theoretical allusion in a seminar? Of a growing awareness that you are, by process of elimination, being coerced into offering some comment of support on a complex concept about which you know almost nothing? But you must say something.
Again and again, I saw teacher-student conversations that recalled a familiar scene from Hamlet, which I still had nearly memorized from my high-school acting experiences:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.
We were taught to praise subversives while leading lives of slavish, affected conformity, not only in terms of theory but clothing, tone of voice, and body language. People spoke past each other, making short speeches they had heard in other contexts. Orthodoxies could not be questioned, even in jest. Laughter was an unspontaneous, political tool aimed at approved targets. I knew a graduate student who changed her sexual orientation on the basis of a weekend’s reading in gender theory, and this was a matter of high seriousness rather than absurdity. I’ve heard she has since changed back.
It is impossible to discuss the culture of graduate school without caricature. English departments often become intellectual echo chambers uninterrupted by any external critical voices. In a process called “incestuous amplification,” outsiders are demonized, and insiders are forced to conform or face social ostracism.
Professors, in general, have the luxury of appearing moderate and open to competing ideas, but insecure students often research the opinions of faculty members to ensure that they will be on the correct side of any apparently open dialogue. The powerless seize on small expressions of political opinion from the powerful and embrace these views even more radically in order to prove their loyalty and worthiness.
Of course, most of us probably didn’t recognize that we were latecomers to the grad-school pyramid scheme. Theory with a capital T grew up with the expansion of graduate programs and the adjunctification of higher education during the last 30 years. It was a ticket to success for a charmed circle of insiders: a few people at elite institutions with the connections and advance knowledge to get in and out of the game before the general rush. The language of theory -- carefully deployed in the world of academic hiring and publication -- still functions in ways that suggest the sub rosa communications of Ivy League clubmen in the world of investment banking.
By the turn of the millennium, however, the jargon-laden writing was on the wall. Shoeshine boys were talking about Jacques Derrida. You could buy books on Theory at Wal-Mart with a six-pack of Zima and an “Indigo Girls” T-shirt.
And now it seems like everyone is rushing to get out with what’s left of their devalued stock. Famous scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Homi Bhabha, and Terry Eagleton have announced that “theory is dead.” Of course, at this late date, it’s as if our leaders have emerged from months of concentrated thought to announce that Jefferson Starship is no longer on the cutting edge of popular music.
Upon reading the official death notices, my first thought is typically, “Oh, great! I spent 10 years learning something that is now completely useless.” It’s as if I had majored in phrenology. I’d be better off if I had written my dissertation on the healing powers of crystals. At least some people believe in that. But now what am I going do? Will I still be able to wear my black turtlenecks, Doc Martens, and hip-nerd glasses?
Another part of me is relieved, as if I had been informed of the death of the sickly, senile, and dependent relation who treated me rotten when I was a kid. I want to know where Theory is buried, so I can go and dance on its grave.
I can’t even figure out what “English” is anymore; after 10 years of graduate school and five years on the tenure track I can’t understand 80 percent of PMLA, the discipline’s major journal. I can’t talk to most people in my own profession, not that we have anything to say to each other. We don’t even buy each other’s books; apparently they are not worth reading. We don’t go to each other’s panels. Why would we? At conferences we stand around and complain about how awful everything is, how there’s no point to continuing, but nobody has any idea what to do next.
For the partners retiring from the big firms, the era of the elegiac academic memoir has begun (“It was like the ‘summer of love’ at Duke in the late 80s”). But most of the post-boomers are still looking frantically for the Next Big Thing and trying to climb aboard it as if it were the last chopper out of Saigon.
I suppose it is poetic justice that I am now concluding a semester of teaching my department’s introduction to literary theory. I asked to teach it, in part, to finally begin to give myself the systematic education that it was impossible to get in the frenzy of graduate school and the job scramble. But I also wanted a chance to teach theory in the way that I wish it had been taught to me.
I believe that literary and cultural theory can be subtle, learned, passionate, and aesthetically pleasing. And, of course, on a basic level, it is impossible to be a critic without some kind of theory. To claim to have no theory is like pretending to have perfect objectivity. We’re all theorists now, and, ultimately, my grievance with theory has more to do with the credulousness of some secondhand practitioners than with the judicious application of various theories themselves.
I want my students to see theory as a means of shedding partial light on texts -- not a set of self-righteous dogmas that make literature irrelevant except as grist for the political mill. I want them to question the fundamental assumptions of everything, including theory itself. I want my students to know how to talk the talk, so that they will not have to be intimidated by the cynical use of jargon. I want them to avoid the tendency of Theory -- as it is too often practiced -- to define in painstaking detail the mote in thy brother’s eye while ignoring the beam in thine own.
And, in the process, I am trying to teach myself not to care about the “Next Big Thing.” I recognize that, given my position in the profession, I can only get a hot stock tip at precisely the moment when it becomes worthless. Most professors in the provinces learn, after a few intellectual bankruptcies, that theory is a sucker’s game.
The great luxury of a tenured position -- which, with any luck, is on my professional horizon -- is the time to become genuinely learned: the time to let your intellectual portfolio mature, instead of investing in the latest academic get-rich-quick scheme.
Thomas H. Benton is the pseudonym of an assistant professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college. He writes occasionally about academic culture and the tenure track and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com