Critical theory has found its voice here among the humanities

By Simeon Moss

No American campus in the past 25 years has been more involved in the growth of critical theory, in all its modern diversity, than has Cornell. And the story doesn't end there.

Once viewed apprehensively by many faculty as a threat to the traditional edifices of the humanities, theory now is a readily accepted, pervasive contributor to the humanities on campus and is part of the fabric of many undergraduate classes.

"Critical theory has a very distinguished history at Cornell," says Jonathan Culler, the Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the university's senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. A leading theorist and author of several important books in the field of literary theory, Culler is a former editor of Diacritics, the internationally acclaimed journal of literary criticism and theory, created at Cornell in the 1970s and published by the Department of Romance Studies.

Jonathan Culler, senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, stands in front of a copy of a Parthenon frieze, purchased and delivered to Cornell in 1881 by the university's first president, Andrew Dickson White, and now in the lobby of the dean's office in Goldwin Smith Hall. It is part of the university's Henry W. Sage Collection. Charles Harrington/University Photography

"The vitality in the area of theory at Cornell grew constantly during the 1970s [a decade in which postmodernist theory took off on American campuses] and it has remained at a very high level," says Peter Uwe Hohendahl. Internationally known for his work on the Frankfort School of cultural theory, he is director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies at Cornell, a home for much interdisciplinary work in critical theory on campus.

Among other Cornell faculty members upholding the university's strong tradition in critical theory are: Dominick LaCapra, director of Cornell's celebrated Society for the Humanities and its School of Criticism and Theory; Susan Buck-Morss, professor of government, social theorist and author of the influential Dreamworld and Catastrophe; David Bathrick, chair of theatre, film and dance and editor of New German Critique, a leading international interdisciplinary journal focusing on cultural studies and theory; Nelly Furman, director of the French Studies Program and a leading voice in textual and psychoanalytic criticism; Richard Klein, professor of French literature and author of Eat Fat and Cigarettes are Sublime, which bring the insights of critical theory to bear on contemporary social issues; Leslie Adelson, chair of German Studies and well known for her work on gender and ethnicity and their implications for German cultural and literary theory; Naoki Sakai, professor of Asian Studies and senior editor of the multilingual journal of cultural theory and translation, Traces (see story) ; and Tim Murray, professor of English and co-curator of the new Internet art journal, CTHEORY Multimedia.

In fact, faculty members who do and teach theory -- with great distinction -- can be found in almost every department on the university's Arts Quad.

"We have outstanding humanities faculty here ... and you can feel the excitement," says Satya Mohanty, Cornell professor of English, who is known for his development of a "realist theory" of social identity and multicultural politics. Mohanty is one of the organizers of a major, bicoastal (Stanford-Binghamton-Cornell) research project, titled "The Future of Minority Studies: Redefining Identity Politics," convening on campus this month. (For more information visit: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/fms/cornell.html .)

"The thing that makes this campus distinctive," Mohanty says of literary studies at Cornell, "is the intellectual vitality. One of the exciting things about this place -- for people looking at us from the outside -- is that we produce literary theory of various stripes; we're not all deconstructionists or new historicists. And more importantly, we produce different strands or even schools of thought that can interact with one another, debate one another. That's where the vitality comes from."

Says Biodun Jeyifo, also a noted theorist and professor of English, whose focus is in the areas of colonial and post-colonial studies: "Theory at Cornell is perhaps distinguished by the fact that, when due acknowledgement has been made of the high visibility of post-structuralism in its many formations -- deconstruction; psychoanalysis; gay, lesbian and bisexual studies; and visual culture -- there is no central orthodoxy, no reigning current of theory here, unlike some of the other prominent 'theory' places on the West and East Coasts."

But for many people outside of the field, and outside of the academy, theory is at best a murky and at worst a subversive pursuit that in literary studies, at least, offers "too much discussion of non-literary matters, too much debate about general questions whose relation to literature is scarcely evident, [and] too much reading of difficult psychoanalytical, political and philosophical texts," relates Culler in his helpful book, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 1997).

Still, there's no getting away from theory. "Even literary critics who are 'against theory,' as the title of an essay put it, tend to be not only familiar with it but marked by it in ways that strongly influence their thinking," says LaCapra, the Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies.

And students and scholars who complain about the difficulties of theory have no excuse, says Mohanty. "It isn't all that difficult if you approach it with the basic amount of intelligence and intellectual commitment. If you're indifferent, everything will seem difficult. But if you have the right amount of commitment and passion, you will realize that it's not that hard to understand."

"Some forms of literary and cultural theory have been accused for years of being unintelligible and closed to all but a very few professional scholars of theory," says Cornell Provost Biddy Martin, widely known for her work on gender theory and cultural theories of sexuality. "Ironically, however, the development of theory can be credited with having posed fundamental questions about the construction of meaning that have expanded the purview of literary criticism. One of the most important questions theorists ask is: What historical, social and psychological forces limit what we take to be intelligible? Of what value is it to us and to our students to stretch our minds beyond those apparent limits? How have creative writers consistently enlarged our capacity to imagine and understand what is only apparently unimaginable?"

So, when describing the approach to theory in most undergraduate courses on campus, it is probably more accurate to say it is not so much "studied and taught" as it is encountered in use and absorbed, as faculty and students pursue the analysis of texts and materials.

Satya Mohanty, professor of English, in his Goldwin Smith Hall office. Robert Barker/University Photography

Mohanty teaches an undergraduate course called Literature as Moral Inquiry, which involves some moral philosophy, including Aristotle and Kant, and close reading of literary works such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Achebe's Things Fall Apart. "I don't teach it as a theory class, although the theory is there," he says. "You begin with where students are -- their questions, their concerns -- and then you move deeper into those questions. You don't begin by saying 'here is a new technical language you need to learn.' The moment you do that, you squash their enthusiasm and their originality."

As humanities departments and the range of their concerns have become more diverse and multidisciplinary, theory has grown in importance and vitality within the curriculum. But its impact has been demonstrated, at the undergraduate level, not in a growth in the amount of theoretical terminology required for learning, but by an expansion in the fields of investigation and possible areas of inquiry.

Two of the university's departments, Romance Studies and German studies, have long been noted for their commitment to interdisciplinary work on literature and culture and for the variety of critical paradigms that enter into their curricula. Both have several faculty members whose courses are cross-listed in other departments, and both cover areas of study as varied as post-colonial theory, film and visual culture, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, music, the history of ideas and theater.

But during the past 25 years or so, the growth in the influence of theory in America seems to have had its greatest visibility in the area of literary studies. And the repercussions of the accompanying expansion of the so-called literary canon -- works deemed to be essential to the study of literature -- have been a topic of debate for social critics of all stripes. The direct effect of the burgeoning canon, at universities, has been that previously excluded works by women and other historically marginalized groups are now routinely included on course syllabi, along with many things not perceived to be literature at all -- such as television, movies, songs, pamphlets and other cultural artifacts.

"Literary theory and other forms of theory expand the horizon of how we think about all sorts of things: language, meaning, culture, gender, history; they open the possibility of new paths for imagination ...," says Natalie Melas, associate professor of comparative literature, whose work focuses on the problem of cultural comparison in the context of colonialism and its legacies. "Over the past 10 years, at least, what goes under the name theory in the humanities has exceeded the bounds of literature, per se, and of language. It is more varied, harder to define and goes under different names -- cultural theory, for instance," she says.

The genre of literary theory now encompasses the perspectives of anthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social and intellectual history and sociology.

"Literary theory makes you think directly about the conceptual framework and the concepts and assumptions that you bring to bear on the cultural objects," says Culler. "It can be of value both in helping explore cultural objects, by giving you more tools to think about them, but also valuable by its questioning of ideas or concepts that people might otherwise just take for granted: What is meaning? What is context? What is an author?"

And people in the field have taken up the writings of theorists outside of literary studies because their analyses of language, or mind, or history or culture offer new and persuasive accounts of textural and cultural matters, Culler says. "Literary theory in particular, and especially in recent years, has been extremely interdisciplinary. It starts from and returns to the literary materials -- but because literature can be about anything, literary theory can also concern itself with an extraordinarily wide range of questions, from the authority of 'experience' to the ways in which identities are produced, discovered, maintained or negotiated."

Going hand-in-hand with, or perhaps pushing, the expansion of the canon and the proliferation of theory, says Mohanty, has the been "the underlying energy of the social movements that define our times. The anticolonial struggles, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay, lesbian and bisexual movement, the human rights movements of various kinds -- they've generated ideas everywhere," he says. "It wasn't just a political change, it was also an intellectual one -- we thought in new ways, we came up with new questions."

Adds Jeyifo: "Literary theory in the last three or four decades came in the wake and on the heels of the great social movements of the '60s and early '70s and proposed ideas and perspectives questioning age-old Eurocentric ideas about what literature is and isn't, how we determine value, who is included and excluded in constructions of traditions and canons of writing, what writing itself is and the authority it exercises in relation to speech and other expressive forms and modes. And while theory did not initially create the conditions that brought women and minority scholars into the nation's academies, it did act as a powerful bulwark for the consolidation of their presence in the so-called 'mainstream' departments."

But the expansion, or obliteration, of the canon has some popular critics bemoaning the compromising of literary standards and the marginalization of the "classics." Within the academy, the debate over the expansion of the canon was played out during the so-called "culture wars" of the '70s and '80s.

"In the culture wars, people were worried that this expansion of the canon would result in the complete loss of the study of 'serious' literature, and people would be spending all their time studying soap operas," says Culler. "But the fact that this hasn't happened has helped calm the culture wars. People discovered that the fact students at Cornell or Stanford were now reading a wider range of literary works was not bringing down Western civilization after all."

And in fact, Culler says, theory has reinvigorated the traditional canon, "opening the door to more ways of reading the 'great works.' ... Certainly Shakespeare, who is always cited as the major cultural monument, has never been more popular."

One look at Cornell's massive volume, "Courses of Study," in the area of English and comparative literature bears this out. Courses titled The Reading of Fiction, The Reading of Poetry, Great Books and The English Literary Tradition contain heavy doses of Shakespeare and other traditional giants, such as Chaucer, Spencer, Keats, Austen, Lawrence, Dickinson, Conrad and Melville.

But now also included are works by authors such as Lu Hsun, Tagore, Borges, Mahfouz, Soyinka, Achebe, Erdrich and Morrison. And the questions being raised in these courses are theoretical, for instance in the course The European Novel: "How do novels reflect the world? What can they tell us about structures of knowing and understanding? How do novels interact with the world of their readers?"

And it stands to reason that the growth of theory would go hand in hand with the re-examination of a once self-evident canon. "As a critique of common sense and exploration of alternative conceptions," says Culler, "theory involves a questioning of the most basic premises or assumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that might have been taken for granted."

"The funny thing is that this is the way many cultures of the past used to do 'literary criticism,'" says Mohanty. "It's only in the last hundred years or so that criticism has become narrowly focused on texts whose value was taken to be self-evident. When the Greeks talked about literature -- and it wasn't just a group of professional critics talking about it -- they were examining it in the context of life and ideas in general. Almost every culture had this sort of practice of talking about texts that were written or orally transmitted. I think we may be getting back to that more expansive and engaged way of doing literary criticism."

Mohanty tells a story about a bright young woman who was in one of his undergraduate classes about seven or eight years ago. One day after class, back in his office, he heard a knock on his door. "Come in," he said. It was this student, holding up her copy of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which he'd been teaching in the first few weeks of the class. The student said, "Do you think I could talk to you for a second? If you're busy, I can come back later." Clearly there is something going on with her, Mohanty thought. So he said, "No, no. Let's talk." She stood at the door, with the door half open, and didn't come in. But she said, pointing to the book: "I just want to tell you. This is very exciting."

"We're talking about what some consider very dry stuff, philosophy and theory, and she's visibly moved," Mohanty says. "She comes back later and we talk for over an hour. And this is not a graduate student. This is not somebody who intended to go on to do a Ph.D. I've seen that kind of response a number of times. And it is something theory has brought to the literature classroom. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, taught by an Indian American professor in the English department who's also teaching Beloved and Achebe's Things Fall Apart in the same course -- that's the experience of 'theory,' all those new and odd and exciting connections!"