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The Profession of Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David Kaufmann
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Abstract

The recent expansion of literary theory and the invocation of politics in this theory contribute and respond to the tensions sustaining literature departments. Though created and nourished by specialization, the profession bases its legitimation on a generalist ideology that opposes or denies the reification on which the profession depends. This justification claims an important political function for literature departments, but theory's structures of self-presentation, as well as the exigencies of a bureaucratized academy, undermine these political ends. In literary theory, a misleading conflation of institutional and national politics is absolutely unavoidable. To maintain the allimportant fiction of the general utility of literary study, one must elide the difference between the politics of the university and those of the republic. Theory is essential to the institutions sustaining literary study and necessarily more and less political than it might claim.

Type
Special Topic: The Politics of Critical Language
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 3 , May 1990 , pp. 519 - 530
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

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