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THE LAST time I addressed an ADE seminar was in 1989, when I was a few weeks from stepping down as department head at Carnegie Mellon University. What I presented then was a farewell to administration, what I termed my lame duck swan song. Now I am shortly to become a dean which in the present economic climate for universities is, I am starting to think, to make myself into another kind of duck, that well-known target of both faculty members and higher administrators, a sitting duck. My topic at Waco in 1989 was the positive difference that theory could make to the need felt throughout the discipline for a revitalized English curriculum (Waller, “Subject”). An outside committee had just concluded that Carnegie Mellon had the best-conceived curriculum in the country, one that should be a model for other departments, so I was feeling very upbeat as I contemplated handing the department over to may successor.
Three years later, my topic is a more sobering one, as we look across the country at wholesale attacks on theory, at hardening positions on the Left and Right, and at the whole political correctness fiasco. Theory has been made, by advocates and opponents, into a term of fierce contestation, and the repression and bullying that many of us used to associate with beleaguered traditionalists are all too often demonstrated by those who once advertised themselves as victimized progressives, often with a self-righteousness unsubtle enough to gladden the heart of any neoconservative PC hunter. The dominant metaphors of a few years ago of engagement, interaction, and dialogue—see, for instance, in the reports of the Wyzata conference on the PhD in English and of the 1987 English Coalition—have been replaced by those of confrontation, battle, the hunting down of enemies, and the beating up or destroying of adversaries.
Despite the present combativeness, my view remains that a much-needed revitalization is occurring in English and related humanistic studies and that it has primarily to do with what we rather loosely term theory. If this revitalization is to succeed, we must recognize that we are in, to use Raymond Williams's famous phrase, a “long” revolution, adapt to local political conditions, and remember those cautions old friends, application and practicality. We need to acknowledge that change comes slowly and requires patience, (often) compromise, and above all what I term “polylogue,” the multiple dialogues that should go on among us all—faculty members, students, and administrators—about the goals of liberal education and, for those of us in English, about how we might achieve that difficult bringing together of interests in reading and writing, rhetoric and literature, and practice and theory that make up an English department.
One heartening phenomenon is that in the last ten years, in many positive ways, theory has indeed transformed the typical undergraduate English curriculum, sometimes at the margins, sometimes (as recent ADE surveys of the major have shown) at the very center. Looking across the profession, Kathleen McCormick argues that in this past decade there have been three ways in which theory has been brought into the English curriculum. The first is a wholesale shift of focus: the substitution of the study of theoretical texts for literary texts, constituting in effect a new canon and transforming the study of English from the study of one body of texts to the study of another. That was an approach our department rejected—although we subsequently move the curriculum in that direction, to may own great regret. Too easily, I believe, such a position produces the dangerous silliness of “all texts are equal except literary texts which are less equal than others,” an idea whose iconoclasm has not helped the retheorizing of the curriculum. Plays, poems, novels, and other fictional discourses have too long been the focus of power and pleasure (both concepts that certainly require close attention) for the new politically correct puritans to deny them places in the curriculum and to replace (rather than to complement) the study of, say, Wordsworth's lyrics with an essay by de Man or King Lear with the TV show All-Star Wrestling.
The second approach to introducing theory into the curriculum is the most widespread. It is to add a course or two in theory to an existing traditional, canonical curriculum. This gradualist tactic—or what I once termed the park-bench approach—can have productive long-term effects, may disrupt a department less than more thoroughgoing approaches, and may have better chances of long-term success. But there is a major danger. It may produce students who are puzzled, intellectually schizophrenic, and cynical: in X's class we are formalists; in Y's we are neo-Marxists. It isolates the different epistemologies of the curriculum. The opportunity for polylogue may never develop.
The third approach, which is closest to what we did at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s, is to foreground some central theoretical issues and to encourage teachers to make them part of the discussions and debates in the department's other courses. This goal can be achieved in various ways; our choice was to institute a core of three sophomore- and junior-level courses built around the concepts of language, history, and culture: Discursive Practices, Discourse and Historical Change, and Reading Twentieth-Century Culture (Waller, “Paradigm Shift”; “Powerful Silence”). Discursive Practices focused on how language carries the values and conflicts of our cultural history. Since we believed that students should think seriously about history and historical thinking, Discourse and Historical Change dealt with questions of historical interpretation, the methodologies and epistemologies for reading the past; matters of historical research, historical difference, and several theories of historical narrativization were studied in relation to a selection of texts. How factors of race, gender, and class enter into the construction of readers as historians and into their histories has been a major concern. Reading Twentieth-Century Culture addressed what it is to live in modern and contemporary culture and focused on reading literary nonliterary works (including philosophy, painting, and music) since the advent of modernism. Theoretical issues raised by essays about modern culture intensified the reading of texts and paintings, for example, and the students were encouraged to become part of important debates in the contemporary cultural world. I was proud of this model and of our curricular achievements, and I would like to share the lessons we learned, or should have learned, from our experiences.
The first lesson is this: However strongly we may be called by inner voices of theory to the barricades of revolution, it is far more important to build a sense of community than it is to establish an agenda for intellectual purity, let alone to strike politically correct attitudes. One of the most heartening aspects of our work was that it encouraged faculty members with a variety of critical viewpoints to meet, debate, experiment, and modify their own practices. We saw change occurring at different speeds with different people, and while our goals were kept clear, it should be recognized, not least by administrators, that there may be a variety of ways to attain such goals. We were not simply relativistic; we were pluralistic, seeking common goals but acknowledging difference as a means of achieving them. In setting up our curricular categories, for instance, we aimed to layer the more controversial issues we wanted discussed—such as gender, race, and class—across the curriculum instead of using them as tests of loyalty or rallying points. Our rallying points—language, history, and culture—were not in themselves especially controversial, and the courses built around these issues were deliberately designed to avoid presenting students with any kind of party line on any of the issues raised. But the courses did point to the constructed and changing nature of the curriculum. They were designed to get across to students that there are indeed real and important differences in the discipline and the world and that students ought to know what these differences are, why they exist, and how to argue for and against them. So humanist, formalist, history-of-ideas, feminist, semiotic, and historicist (new and old) approaches to texts were all encouraged. None was especially to be privileged, let alone put down; rather, the logic and assumptions of such approaches, even in a relatively simplified form, were to be made part of the multiple dialogues, the polylogues in which students were invited to participate and to which they were encouraged to bring their own reactions and views. Because participation was more important than purity, we did in fact change the consciousness of more people, students and faculty members alike; I believe that we effected more potentially revolutionary change than if we had enforced a standard of political correctness and ostracized those falling short.
We had critics, within and without, from the Left and the Right. Critics from the Right of course suggested that we were destroying Western civilization as it has always been known. Critics from the Left claimed that we were reifying the decadence of Western civilization and trying to avoid the need for relentless critique and confrontation. Our curriculum was thus liberal in the best (to both sets of our critics, the worst) sense. Our aim was to produce an atmosphere of civilized and undogmatic dialogue (or, since there are many voices involved, polylogue): we wanted to introduce issues of gender, race and ethnicity, internationalism, and class into the curriculum in order to encourage our students to raise questions about these issues from a variety of viewpoints, not to follow an agenda derived from a single perspective or from a limited set of perspectives. Our approach enabled students both to understand something of their constructedness and to become agents—aware not merely of how they were constructed in their different histories by social, cultural, ethnic, gender-related factors, by scientific or religious paradigms of thought and material practices, but also of how those traditions overlap or contrast and open up both students' understanding of their places in a complex culture and their possibilities for choices and actions and the principles by which they make those choices and carry out those actions.
My first suggestion, then, is that you observe the principle of polylogue. It will win you more battles than insisting on radical purity, and it will get the issues on the table. Second, take teaching seriously as a crucial intellectual activity for the department. Institute, encourage, and reward interest in pedagogy and application: discussions, seminars, workshops, outside speakers, and planning meetings for courses. to encourage a rich sense of community, all teachers of our core courses shared their syllabi and met regularly to discuss issues and pedagogy during the first few years of the program. We produced, at least for a few years, a community of highly committed teachers. We listened and watched not only our teaching but also our scholarship change. I cannot stress too strongly my belief that such interchanges are an essential part of successfully introducing theory and theorizing into the curriculum. The sharing of difference is crucial—not to develop a party line but rather to foster a commitment to the importance of the issues being discussed and enacted and to the right of all participants, faculty members and students alike, to enter into the polylogue from various points of view.
In a sense, to say that we were teaching theory to our students is a misstatement. Our main goal was to integrate not so much theory as the practice of theorizing into the learning process: we aimed to bring the practice of sustained reflection on the epistemological and methodological issues involved in reading literary and other works into the curriculum as a whole. A theorizing curriculum, which is how ours at that time could perhaps be best characterized, is one in which students may study a variety of literary and other cultural texts but above all one in which they are explicitly encouraged to raise integrate into their studies intellectual issues from contextual reading. In such a curriculum students are encouraged to put their own developing positions under scrutiny. We wanted not just to introduce our students to the wonderfully rich diversity of textual experiences available in English but also to provide as many connections, multiple and interactive perspectives, and approaches as possible for those textual experiences. That multiplicity, we insisted, should be taken seriously in the classroom: students should be encouraged to enter into the debates, discovering, refining, or revising their own positions on the various issues that arose.
My third suggestion is to hire new faculty members who have been trained to be committed teachers rather than those who consider themselves primarily theorists. Pedagogy, in short, it the enactment of theory: by their teaching, ye shall know them. Look for graduates of programs where pedagogy is taken seriously, where courses in, say, hermeneutics or new historicism are given but where they are complemented by courses in those areas graduates will actually have to teach, where the interaction of literary and rhetorical theory is taken seriously, and where more than lip service is given to pedagogical theory and practice. Interview not to get a theorist but to get theorizing into the classroom. As Freire notes ironically, regardless of how “liberatory” an educator's intent may be, too often so-called radical pedagogy is even more repressive than what it tries to replace. What Freire calls the “banking system” of education may simply make the students the depositories and the teacher a depositor, issuing communiqués and making deposits that “the students patiently memorize and repeat,”, a phenomenon nowhere more evident than in currently fashionable graduate “theory” programs, in which students may be encouraged to master theoretical texts terminology without knowing how theory relates no literary texts or recognizing that many of these “contemporary” issues have a history and did not first appear in the last issue of Boundary 2.
Next, be aware that you may, however subtly, indeed be making waves in the university community in challenging, say, the depoliticization of literary studies, in breaking down disciplinary boundaries and assumptions, or perhaps in bringing issues like gender into areas of scholarship and teaching where they have been excluded or marginalized. Choose as your spokespersons experts in persuasion rather than in confrontation, listeners and mediators rather than those who want to display their familiarity with the latest theoretical shibboleths. There are too many theorists who define their correctness by the degree of opposition they meet. Also, be selective about which issues to make a stand on and which to be provocative about, especially when addressing the larger university community and the administration. Usually, it is better to slowly establish a solid base for your changes than to wave the flag of ideological purity. It is better to have your students discussing gender from a multiplicity of viewpoints in courses on Shakespeare or technical writing than it is to antagonize colleagues and outsiders by demanding institutional renunciation of the destructive phallocentricity of the whole of literature. Your purgative principal extremism may acquire a few converts and zealots, but you will not touch, even piecemeal, the majority of your students and colleagues.
The same principle of subtlety applies on the level of curriculum development. Avoid unnecessary flagwaving. There are big bulls out there, and if you can just let them get on and eat grass while you quietly enclose the pasture, do it, however masochistically satisfying you may find pointing to the number of scars you have received from being gored in institutional bullfighting. In our curriculum, language, history, and culture were not in themselves controversial or politicized theories. Rather, they were presented as sites of interest, sometimes of intense struggle, in past and recent theory and literary and cultural practice. We intended, however, not that the conflicts should be agonistic struggles, with triumphant correct and defeated incorrect positions, but that our staging them as intellectually complex and crucial to understanding the nature of the reading (and to some extent the writing) experience would produce a shared awareness of some of the great concepts that had shaped our culture and an awareness that such debates were intensely interesting, complex, and important.
Finally, do not neglect the multiplicity of practical details, organizational and intellectual problems and challenges that, from a department chair's viewpoint, should of course be delegated as much as possible to colleagues with appropriate skills. Such matters include the appropriate levels at which to teach theoretical and methodological issues in a particular institution; avoidance of conflicts that may degenerate into antagonistic (and, some would say, masculinist) struggles for hegemony among factions; the place of “classics” in theoretically oriented courses; and the much overlooked issue of pedagogy. While I will not pretend we settled all these matters, we certainly though them important, and they animated our discussions and the thinking that went into the making of the curriculum.
These observations may convey something of our practices during the years in which our program was taking shape. Ideals did not, of course, always match realities, especially when faculty members with very different agendas started to teach in the curriculum, when some teachers saw theory (in the current narrow sense used by some in our discipline) as an end in itself or wanted to politicize the curriculum in ways that were inimical to the spirit and goals of polylogue. Theory has recently acquired such prestige in the discipline that it seems likely to engender a familiar elitism and lack of concern for curricular coherence, classroom practices, and the students themselves. There are also frightening signs of an institutional backlash against theory, and one of the saddest experiences an administrator can have is watching his or her patient work undone because members of an impatient, paranoid, or monomaniacal group want quicker results—or or perhaps want to advertise themselves as victims of the system, which they proceed to confront and provoke as much as they can.
Such self-destructiveness, either self-generated or imposed from outside, is not inevitable. There is certainly a place for the prophet and, where necessary, for confrontation, for demand rather than compromise. But more important, there is a need for administrators who, like a materialist critic constructing a symptomatic reading of a text, know how to probe for subtle weaknesses, places where the system skips a beat or folds in on itself, where transformative possibilities lurk in the margins or just under the surface. Through a combination of firm goals, flexible administration, and principled opportunism, we will find that we are not at the end of theory. In one sense, the question Theory, R.I.P.? is absurd: we are all always already theorists (McCormick). But for those of us who do not wish to let the forces of reaction and intellectual retrenchment dominate—and today they control the agenda in too many ways—we must learn patience, persistence, the importance of polylogue. Theory, R.I.P.? Realize its purpose; root it in practice; really, it's polylogue.
The author is Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies and Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Hartford. This paper was presented at the 1992 ADE Midwestern Summer Seminar at the University of Waterloo.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1989.
McCormick, Kathleen. “Always Already Theorists: Literary Theory in the Undergraduate Curriculum.” Pedagogy Is Politics—Literary Theory and the Teaching of Literature. Ed. Maria Regina Kecht. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.
Waller, Gary. “Knowing the Subject: Critiquing the Self, Critiquing the Culture.” ADE Bulletin 95 (1990): 711. [Show Article]
———. “Powerful Silence: Theory in the English Major.” ADE Bulletin 85 (1986): 3135. [Show Article]
———. “Working within the Paradigm Shift: Poststructuralism and the College Curriculum.” ADE Bulletin 81 (1985): 612. [Show Article]
© 1993 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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