If there is a future and it has anthologies of literature in it, those books will present the last quarter of the 20th Century as the Age of Theory. It’s just a guess of course, but here’s how I arrive at that conclusion:

First, I start with myself. I’m a professor of English who reads the old stuff, but not the old old stuff. I don’t do old English or Middle English, but once we get to about 1500 I can manage. My point is that when I make a prediction about what will endure from today’s work, I am simply assuming that the readers of the future will like what I like—because I read texts that are hundreds of years old and that is the target audience. And I think that such a reader several hundred years from now will be most intrigued by Theory. Not novels. Not short stories or memoirs. Not poetry. Theory. That is what they will be taught to pay attention to and that is what will interest them.

Some names: Among those who write in English: Fredric Jameson, Stanley Fish, Avitall Ronell, Slavoj Zizek, Eve Sedgwick, bell hooks, Terry Eagleton and Katherine Hayles.

And as for how Theory will be presented: It will be taught as the logical outgrowth of modernist literature. Hegel here is the guide: the idea is that thought develops from an early stage where the abstract idea comes garbed in narrative figures that then fall away. It is a move from the concrete to the abstract. The star shifts from the novelist who can represent reality through fictional techniques to the theorist who deconstructs the semiotics of reality. In short we go from Henry James to Jameson, from Proust to Derrida, from Kafka to Lacan.

If you are shocked at that arc, I would ask you to think about how modernist texts were received—the Wasteland, Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, etc. People balked then and said it was crap just like they say Theory is crap now.

Is the age of Theory over? Yes, but for multiple reasons. First with the boomers in the saddle, there will be no more new theory stars for the simple reason that boomers demand that they be crowned the new stars and boomers will never deign to crown each other so balkanization reigns. Second, the star making apparatus that produced the Theory moment has collapsed and third the zeitgeist has moved on. If there is a new thing on the horizon it is whatever mutant child staggers forth from the union of creative writing and theory. A lot of attempts are being made: almost all of it crap (a lot of the language poetry, and high brow meditational poems written by tenured professors at schools like Harvard, the post Nabakov / post Steven King neo gothic thrillers in multiple fonts) . . . but some of it at some point is going to get very good. That keeps me going.

***

As I am not teaching theory this semester for the first time in a very long time, I will blog some on the theorists I like. First up, Alain Badiou, the hottest theory star around right now.