No matter how bad I feel, I am better off than these two dudes. If this be (fair & balanced) gratitude, so be it.
By the time I get to Phoenix....
I feel good....
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Three (3) BIG Questions
A good friend (yes, I have a few) sent along a page from The World's Religions by Huston Smith. Huston Smith? A Google search turned up the fact that Smith—a Methodist—is the author of the foremost book used in undergrad comparative religion courses. Duh! The page that my chum sent along the page in which Smith discusses the three (3) questions that have always divided people.
Sapper's (F&B) R&R welcomes answers to any or all of Huston Smith's BIG questions. Use the RantMail link to submit entries. If this be (fair & balanced) ambivalence, so be it.
[x Mother Jones]
The World of Religion According to Huston Smith
Smith has devoted his life to the study of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. He believes in them all.
by
Marilyn Snell
Renowned world religions scholar Huston Smith says, "Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere." For Smith, a practicing Methodist who for 26 years has prayed five times a day in Arabic and who, at 78, still does hatha yoga, that line can be drawn creatively or idiosyncratically -- but it must always be done with discipline.
Best known for his book The World's Religions (published in 1958 as The Religions of Man, translated into 12 languages, and still one of the most widely used college textbooks on comparative religion), Smith believes the role of what he calls the world's "wisdom traditions" is a simple one: to help us behave decently toward one another. His documentary films on Hinduism, Sufism, and Tibetan Buddhism have all won awards, and in 1996 he was featured on Bill Moyers' five-part PBS special "The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith." He has taught religion and philosophy at MIT, Syracuse University, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Q: You were born a Methodist and have stuck with it, although you've often voiced your frustration with its doctrine. Why have you stayed in the church?
A: The faith I was born into formed me. I come from a missionary family -- I grew up in China -- and in my case, my religious upbringing was positive. Of course, not everyone has this experience. I know many of my students are what I have come to think of as wounded Christians or wounded Jews. What came through to them was dogmatism and moralism, and it rubbed them the wrong way. What came through to me was very different: We're in good hands, and in gratitude for that fact it would be well if we bore one another's burdens. I haven't found any brief formula that tops that. However, I certainly would not choose that messenger if I were starting from scratch. {publish-page-break}
Q: Why not?
A: Methodists are very good on good works: Two hundred homeless people get a hot meal every evening at my church, for example. Socially, they are ahead of me: My pastor is a woman, a lesbian, and her baby and her partner are part of the congregation. Also, mine is a very interracial congregation. However, theologically they are totally washed-out.
Q: You pray in Arabic five times a day and regularly do yoga. Have you adopted these practices to supplement this washed-out Christian faith?
A: At every stage in my religious life I was perfectly happy with what I had -- until along came a tidal wave that crashed over me. For example, I was perfectly content with Christianity until Vedanta -- the philosophical version of Hinduism -- came along. When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade. Later, I found out that the same truths were there in Christianity -- in Meister Eckehart, St. Augustine, and others. But nobody had told me, not even my professors in graduate school. So, for 10 years, though I still kept up my perfunctory attendance at my Methodist church -- a certain kind of grounding, I think, is useful -- my spiritual center was in the Vedanta Society, whose discussion groups and lectures fed my soul. Then Buddhism came along, and another tidal wave broke over me. In none of these moves did I have any sense that I was saying goodbye to anything. I was just moving into a new idiom for expressing the same basic truths.
Q: Many in the West are attracted to Eastern religions because they avoid the kind of rule-making and dualistic thinking so fundamental to Christianity. Is that accurate?
A: The notion that Western religions are more rigid than those of Asia is overdrawn. Ours is the most permissive society history has ever known -- almost the only thing that is forbidden now is to forbid -- and Asian teachers and their progeny play up to this propensity by soft-pedaling Hinduism's, Buddhism's, Sufism's rules. The Hindu Laws of Manu and the Buddhist Vinaya (over 200 rules for the sangha, or monastic order) make the Ten Commandments and the Rule of St. Benedict look flabby in comparison.
Q: You've said that your students seem to be much more interested in spirituality than in religion. What's the difference? Why do you think young people today are so averse to organized religion?
A: The first question is easy: Religion is institutionalized spirituality. As to the second, anti-authoritarianism is part of it. Also, institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion.
Q: But haven't institutions always been problematic? Why this mass exodus?
A: It's true that the mainline churches are in terrible trouble. They've lost close to 25 percent of their membership in the last 25 or so years, and there's no sign that that's going to change. The chief reason for this is that they have accommodated the culture. Seminaries like the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley are training ministers to go out into these mainline churches. But the teachers in the seminaries look up to the university, and the university ethos is secular to the core.
People are not losing their religious needs, but they are going to three places to get their needs met. One is to conservative churches, which, for all their social benightedness, nevertheless do present their congregations with a different view of reality. Second, they are going to Asian religions. I was born on a mission field in China and it looks like I'm going to die on an American one, because America is becoming a mission field for Buddhism, Sufism, and other Eastern religions. Third, they are going to the New Age, which when I'm feeling cynical I refer to as "New Age frivolity," because some of it is rather flaky.
Q: What's the difference between your spiritual practices and the New Age practice of taking a bit from shamanism, a bit from Buddhism, a bit from the goddess, etc.?
A: What you describe as New Age, and what I call the cafeteria approach to spirituality, is not the way organisms are put together, nor great works of art. And a vital faith is more like an organism or work of art than it is like a cafeteria tray.
The New Age movement looks like a mixed bag. I see much in it that seems good: It's optimistic; it's enthusiastic; it has the capacity for belief. On the debit side, I think one needs to distinguish between belief and credulity. How deep does New Age go? Has it come to terms with radical evil? More, I am not sure how much social conscience there is in New Age thinking. If we think, for example, that we are drawing closer to transcendence or God but are not drawing closer in compassion and concern for our fellow human beings, we're just fooling ourselves. Do New Age groups produce a Mother Teresa or a Dalai Lama? Not that I can see. So, at its worst, it can be a kind of private escapism to titillate oneself.
Q: One of the most important roles of spiritual practices has been to help us behave decently toward one another. How would you respond to those secular humanists who feel that Freud, Marx, or Darwin are teachers enough in terms of showing us how to behave decently and find meaning in this world?
A: I would not say that ethical behavior is not possible for the atheist or agnostic. It is. A couple of pretty good examples are Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. However, I will have to say that if we take the human lot as a whole, these two men must be seen as exceptions.
I don't want to justify religion in terms of its benefits to us. I believe that, on balance, it does a lot of bad things, too -- a tremendous amount. But I don't think that the final justification of religion is the good it does for people. I think the final justification is that it's true, and truth takes priority over consequences. Religion helps us deal with what is most important to the human spirit: values, meaning, purpose, and quality.
Historically, religion has given people another world to live in, a world more adaptive to the human spirit. As a student of world religions, I see religion as the winnower of the wisdom of the human race. Of course, not everything about these religions is wise. Their social patterns, for example -- master-slave, caste, and gender relations -- have been adopted from the mores of their time. But in their view of the nature of reality, there is nothing in either modernity or postmodernity that rivals them.
Q: You've been critical of the role secularism and science have played in supplanting religion...
A: I'm nearing 80, and I find myself more optimistic than I've ever been on this subject. In science, for example, physics is already out of the tunnel constructed by Enlightenment thinking. Newtonian physics worked very much at cross-purposes with the Spirit, which is beyond matter, space, and time. Of contemporary physics, Henry Stapp, a world-class physicist at Berkeley, said that "everything we know about nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental process of nature lies outside space-time."
Religion, for its part, says that God, who is the source of it all, is outside nature. Now, don't quote me as saying Henry Stapp says that God exists! He didn't say that at all. Besides, he has no competence to talk about that as a physicist, because physics can't deal with quality or consciousness. Nevertheless, for him to say that the fundamental process of nature is immaterial opens the door for a meeting of physics and faith. Both are speaking the same language in their own domain.
Q: Where does the Native American Church fit into your spiritual pantheon?
A: In 1990, when the Supreme Court stripped the Native American Church of its right to use peyote as its sacrament, Reuben Snake asked if I could help him write a book about the church [One Nation Under God] to respond to this horrendous injustice. One of my jobs was to hit the road and gather accounts of what the church has meant to people. I heard frequent reports of how lives were going down the drain with alcohol, etc., and it was the church that straightened them up. To my mind, the peyote plant is God's flesh just like the bread in the Eucharist is regarded as Christ's body. I believe peyote to be an "entheogen" -- a "god-manifesting" or "god-containing" plant.
By the way, the Native American Church's rights were restored in 1994, but there have been recent moves in the Senate that threaten Native American rights on other fronts.
Q: You were part of the LSD studies at Harvard in the 1960s with Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. How do you feel about the use of mind-altering drugs to attain a kind of mystical experience?
A: First, I have to say that during the three years I was involved with that Harvard study, LSD was not only legal but respectable. Before Tim went on his unfortunate careening course, it was a legitimate research project.
Though I did find evidence that, when recounted, the experiences of the Harvard group and those of mystics were impossible to tell apart -- descriptively indistinguishable -- that's not the last word. There is still a question about the truth of the disclosure. Was the drug-induced mystical experience just an emotional jag that messed up some neural connections? Or was it a genuine disclosure, an epiphany?
Enclosed, or cocooned, in a solid religious context of belief and responsibility, entheogens have played an important part in human religious history. The Native American Church is a good example of this. But what about people who experience this outside of such a context, as most of the subjects at Harvard did? For some people, under some conditions, it can open new vistas, as William James says. But the heart of religion is not altered states but altered traits of character. For me, then, the test of a substance's religious worth or validity is not what kind of far-out experience it can produce, but is the life improved by its use? That's the test. Now, on that score, if you remove the "religious cocoon," the experiences don't seem to have much in the way of discernible, traceable effects. Certainly, they can open new vistas. But, as Ram Dass said, when you get the message, you should hang up. He did. He gave away his fortune and turned himself to good works. Tim Leary didn't hang up.
Q: One of the roles of religion has been to help communities deal with death. In your own life, how has your faith helped you accommodate the inevitability of death?
A: I don't have any fear of death. I do, however, have an inordinate fear of becoming dependent on other people. To me, that's the severest test, not death.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 1997 The Foundation for National Progress
My Kind Of Democrat: Earl Long Of Louisiana
As a child, I was vaguely aware of Huey P. Long and the Long political machine in Louisiana. My maternal grandmother spoke of the Kingfish after we viewed the film version of All The King's Men; Broderick Crawford received the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Willie Stark. Later, I was in my teens when Earl Long arrived in Denver, CO in the late 1950s. Earl was the younger brother and political heir of the Kingfish and governor of Louisiana at that time. Earl's wife (and his political rivals) had the governor committed to a mental health facility in Galveston(?) and somehow, Earl Long was able to escape (with loyal state trooper bodyguards) to Colorado. Earl set up a governor's office in exile in the presidential suite of the Brown Palace Hotel (summer home for President and Mrs. Eisenhower) and went to the Centennial Race Track (horses) and bet enormous sums on every race. After several days (and a lot of national press coverage), Earl was guaranteed a safe return to Louisiana and he went home. My recollection is that he died shortly after his third term ended. Complications associated with alcohol abuse were the likely cause. In the currect season of political mediocrity, Earl Long would be my candidate for president. If this be (fair & balanced) lunacy, so be it.
A.J. Liebling's Delectable Political Jambalaya
by Jonathan Yardley
An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.
Turn to the opening sentences of A.J. Liebling's "The Earl of Louisiana," and three things happen. You are dazzled by the wit and acuity of Liebling's prose, you want to keep on reading for as long as he keeps on writing, and you are struck by how deeply the character of American politics has changed in the four-plus decades since The Earl of Louisiana was first published. To wit:
"Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas -- stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows."
That was 1960, when the first article in Liebling's series about Earl Long, then governor of Louisiana, appeared in the New Yorker. Now, 44 years later, you still can "experience the old-fashioned traditional corn flavor of Golden Bantam," as one seed company puts it, but the old-fashioned traditional corn flavor of Southern politics is as dead as Earl Long himself. Yes, you still can buy a Moon Pie in Ol' Dixie, but the rumpled rustics who inspired Al Capp to create a comic-strip politico called Sen. Jack S. Phogbound long ago vanished, replaced by the blow-dried suburban slicksters who've turned the Solid South into Anyplace, U.S.A.
Even Louisiana is sliding into the monotony of the mainstream -- Louisiana, where, as Liebling fondly wrote, "denials . . . are accepted as affirmations, and it is held a breach of the code for a public man to deny anything that isn't so." Edwin Edwards languishes in prison, with only memories of spectacular gubernatorial malfeasance to console him. The new governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, has an agreeably Cajun-hot name but appears lamentably untainted by scandal. The state's congressional delegation, apart from the amusing W.J. "Billy" Tauzin, provides less local color than an empty bottle of Cajun Power Garlic Sauce.
What a different story it was in 1959, when Liebling journeyed to Louisiana to have a look at the strange doings of its governor, universally known (in the universe of Louisiana) as "old Earl," younger brother of and political heir to the sainted and martyred Huey Long. Earl had assumed the governorship in 1956 for the third time and had been cruising along, fully in control, when suddenly he veered off the track. He made a dramatic if somewhat incoherent appearance on the floor of the state legislature -- he was, in fact, "making a civil-rights speech," to Liebling's astonishment -- after which he was carted off to a mental institution in Texas and subjected to national derision.
Liebling went to Louisiana "thinking of Earl as a Peckerwood Caligula" but soon came to see him as a man of character and conviction, a change that can be charted in the pages of The Earl of Louisiana. So far as I can recall I first read it in the original installments. I was 20 years old, heavily involved with the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina, and obsessed with politics. I bought the book when it was published in 1961, and have now reread it in the Louisiana State University Press edition, which has a useful introduction by the late, legendary T. Harry Williams, biographer of Huey Long and nonpareil authority on all matters Louisianan.
When The Earl of Louisiana appeared, Abbott Joseph Liebling was one of the country's most respected journalists, and surely one of the few in that trade who could be called beloved. Born in 1904 into prosperous New York circumstances, he yearned to be a writer and found his way onto a succession of newspapers, arriving at the New Yorker in 1935. Like his close friend Joseph Mitchell, he wrote atmospheric pieces about the city's neighborhoods and characters. His love for seediness drew him toward boxing, and in time he became the foremost American writer on that subject. He wrote brilliant dispatches from Europe in World War II. He loved to eat and drink and wrote vividly about both. He also loved newspapers and for years wrote the New Yorker's Wayward Press column, a sustained exercise in press criticism that towers above all others.
No matter what he wrote about, he was invariably amusing, sometimes hilariously so. He wrote with real grace, real style, real personality. He had many friends, who loved him just as his readers did, but his private life does not seem to have been happy, as is documented in detail in Raymond Sokolov's dutiful, humor-challenged Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling (1980). He had two unhappy marriages before finding some measure of contentment in a third, to the writer Jean Stafford. His insatiable appetites left him immensely overweight. He ignored doctors' orders to moderate his habits and died in 1963 of various unpleasant causes.
As happens to all journalists, Liebling has been on the treadmill to oblivion during the years since his death, but he is traveling it rather more slowly than most. In the late 1960s he became a cult figure among proponents of the "new journalism," who mistakenly assumed that he had written "personal" journalism such as they wanted to but who boosted his reputation all the same. Today more than a half-dozen of his books are in print, but unfortunately none of these conveys the full breadth and depth of his interests and accomplishments.
Liebling was in most matters a "liberal," yet it is to the "conservative" H.L. Mencken that he is most appropriately compared. Both wrote prose that often ventured into the ornate, even the rococo, a practice conventionally frowned upon among journalists. Both had great appetites, though Mencken had better control of his. Both delighted in the trashy, the seedy, the sordid, the outre, which is to say that both delighted in politics and took a decidedly humorous, tolerant view of its most egregious characters. Mencken's obituary essay on Warren Gamaliel Harding is a classic of American humor, and The Earl of Louisiana is not far behind.
At first encounter The Earl of Louisiana is about two subjects: old Earl's descent into what his many enemies chose to call madness, and the two 1960 primaries in which Louisiana Democrats chose their nominee for governor (in those days in the Solid South, the Democratic nomination was, as invariably was said, "tantamount to election"). On both subjects Liebling is, as always, informed and perceptive. His analysis of Louisiana's incredibly complex political landscape is detailed and astute, and he wastes no time in making plain that old Earl was, as his many friends liked to say, crazy as a fox.
But The Earl of Louisiana is best read today as an evocation of Louisiana before it fell victim to the inevitable forces of homogenization, as a portrait of a distinctive and unexpectedly endearing man who scarcely deserves the ridicule that has become his lot and -- this above all -- as an opportunity to read a few words from the typewriter of the one and only A.J. Liebling.
He was neither the first nor the last to write pungently and perceptively about Louisiana and its politics. Robert Penn Warren's famous novel All the King's Men (1946) is based on the life of Huey Long, and James Conaway's undeservedly neglected Judge (1973) is an unsparing portrait of the echt racist Leander Perez, to name just two among many. But The Earl of Louisiana occupies a place of its own, because its two voices -- Liebling's and old Earl's -- are in perfect counterpoint.
To get into the rhythm of things, a few quotations are in order. Here, for example, Earl is asked by a reporter "whether he could manage his legislators." His reply: "You know, the Bible says that before the end of time billy goats, tigers, rabbits and house cats are all going to sleep together. My gang looks like the Biblical proposition is here." Here he discusses his libel suit against Henry Luce's Time-Life empire: "The Luce people been going on too long picking on people too poor to sue them, and now they're going to get it in the neck. Mr. Luce is like a man that owns a shoe store and buys all the shoes to fit himself. Then he expects other people to buy them." Here is Earl's "general declaration of tolerance," as Liebling calls it: "I'm not against anybody for reasons of race, creed, or any ism he might believe in except nuttism, skingameism or communism."
That's old Earl, talking sense. Here's Liebling talking Louisiana. In the first extract, he is discussing the state primary system, in which a runoff is required if no one gets 50 percent of the vote in the first primary:
"It is unusual for a candidate to win first time around, and if one does he arouses a certain amount of resentment as a spoilsport. After the first primary, each beaten candidate and his backers trade off their support to one of the two men who are still alive, in exchange for what he will bind himself to do for them in the way of legislation, patronage or simple commercial advantage. Naturally, the runoff candidate who looks more likely to win can buy support at lower political prices than the other fellow, but by trying to drive too hard a bargain he may send the business to the underdog. Many a man has beaten himself that way. A Louisiana politician can't afford to let his animosities carry him away, and still less his principles, although there is seldom difficulty in that department."
Here, as icing on the cake, is an episode at the gubernatorial dinner table:
"One of the women guests, a Northerner, inadvertently sat on a jacket a political gent had laid aside. It was a silvery Dacron-Acrilan-nylon-airpox miracle weave nubbled in Danish-blue asterisks. She made one whoop and rose vertically, like a helicopter. She had sat on his gun, an article of apparel that in Louisiana is considered as essential as a zipper. Eyebrows rose about as rapidly as she did, and by the time she came down she decided that comment would be considered an affectation."
As is made plain by the very next sentence -- "A colored man brought a glass wrapped in a napkin . . ." -- The Earl of Louisiana employs the vocabulary of its time and place. Liebling's feelings about civil rights were firm and right-minded, but the N-word was common coin then and there and it appears in these pages with some frequency. My own view is that this is in keeping with the book's accuracy, authenticity and atmosphere, but many may feel otherwise and they are hereby given warning. Still, it would be a real pity if today's prevailing standards of correctness kept readers away from one of the best books ever written about American politics.
The Earl of Louisiana is available in a Louisiana State University Press paperback ($15.95).
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Farewell To Post-Modernist Literary Theory?
Deconstruct this! If this be (fair & balanced) esoterica, so be it.
[x The Christian Science Monitor]
Theory in chaos
Viewing literature through the lens of some "ism" seemed revolutionary in the 1960s. Today, many are calling it an irrelevant approach.
By David Kirby
An old joke used to ask, Where are the last bastions of Marxism? Answer: the Kremlin and the Duke University English department. But now that the Soviet Union has dissolved, the last defenders of Karl Marx's ideas may indeed reside on a pretty, Gothic-style campus in the pinewoods of North Carolina.
For literary traditionalists, the riddle is apropos. They have long bemoaned the effete nature of postmodern literary theory, calling it as hopelessly out of touch with both reality and literature as was Lenin with real-life economics.
But theory's impact on the study of literature in the US has been pervasive if nothing else. Large numbers of the last two generations of English majors have been instructed not to experience novels and poems directly, but rather to view them through the lens of some kind of theory - Marxism being one of the most popular.
The idea was to move away from viewing literature as having any innate "truth" of its own, and rather to study it in relationship to larger schools of thought. But the approach left many students complaining they spent more class time with dry theoreticians than with the great authors they had hoped to encounter.
Today, however, such complaints may be on their way out.
Postmodern literary theory is now transforming itself so rapidly that Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic critics (and others) are flocking back to the drawing board in droves as they search for new approaches to writing and teaching.
Indeed, some academics say that postmodern theory is on the way out altogether and that the heady ideas that once changed the way literature is taught and read will soon be as extinct as the dodo and the buggy whip.
According to some, theory has been losing its grip on academia for years now. "For me, theory reached its apogee in the early 1980's and has since been declining," says Roger Lathbury, professor of American fiction at George Mason University. Today, he says, it's a matter of "the pendulum swinging toward the center."
Some of the biggest names in the field would seem to agree. In Chicago last spring at a discussion sponsored by the journal "Critical Inquiry" cutting-edge thinkers such as Stanley Fish, Frederic Jameson, Homi Bhabha, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. spent two hours saying that postmodern theory was ineffective and no longer mattered in the world outside academe, if it ever did.
And in his new book "After Theory," Terry Eagleton of Manchester University argues that postmodern literary theory (which he defines as "the contemporary movement of thought which rejects . . . the possibility of objective knowledge" and is therefore "skeptical of truth, unity, and progress") was relevant in its heyday, but no more.
In other words, theorists say of the world what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland: there is no there there.
Of course antitheorists have been saying that very thing about theory itself for decades. To an old-school humanist, there's plenty "there" in literature; Shelley's poems are incomparably beautiful, Shakespeare writes about the truths of the mortal condition, and so on.
But Eagleton has never been a tweedy, pipe-smoking purveyor of the humane verities. What makes his new view so startling is that for years, he was one of theory's most committed apologists. Indeed, his 1983 book Literary Theory: An Introduction has long been a standard text in university classrooms and will no doubt continue to be, at least until Eagleton's recantation of all he once held holy becomes the new orthodoxy.
The idea behind Literary Theory was to interrogate and refute what Eagleton and others thought of as lazy, received notions of what is true.
A Marxist himself, Eagleton would have been more interested in the relations between social classes in a Dickens novel, say, than a single character's suffering and redemption.
Still an unreconstructed champion of the lower classes (he writes movingly of his impoverished childhood in his 2001 memoir, "The Gatekeeper"), Eagleton has always enjoyed the gadfly role and boasts that Prince Charles once called him "that dreadful Terry Eagleton."
Toying with the esoteric
All the stranger, then, that, according to Eagleton, "cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver." Eagleton now accuses theory of toying with esoterica while ignoring the real issues of life dealt with by literature.
Specifically, says theory's reformed bad boy, "[theory] has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil..." And that, as Eagleton says, "is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on."
But if theory is so profoundly flawed in its inability to address the ideas and emotions that not only make us individual but also allow us to marry, build communities, and undertake the countless transactions that would be impossible without basic shared assumptions, how did it ever become so popular in the first place? How did the notion that There Is No Truth become The Truth?
Postmodern literary theory is rooted in mid-century European philosophy, though it didn't begin to catch on in America until the late '60s; the Johns Hopkins University conference on "The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" which featured Jacques Derrida and other master theoreticians took place in 1966 and is generally regarded as the theoretical equivalent of the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth Rock.
These were, of course, revolutionary times: The initial phase of the civil rights struggle was peaking, and serious opposition to the Vietnam war was getting underway. College students were chucking out their parents' ideas about race, class, patriotism, sex, music, and recreational drugs the way they might toss a faulty toaster oven out an open dorm window: If it doesn't work, ditch it.
Theory played right into this mind- set; it challenged lazy notions about what's right and what isn't and brought fresh air into a classroom full of mildewed literary practices.
The problem is that by the time theory's anticapitalist, antibourgeois assumptions became standard fare in colleges and universities, the consumer revolution was in high gear.
Before theory came along, most people shopped in department stores and paid in cash; then the malls went up, banks started sending credit cards to people who didn't want them, and television became a 24-hour-a-day advertising medium.
By sometime in the 1980s, the 1960s mantra "If it feels good, do it," seemed more likely to apply to buying a fully-loaded minivan than staging a revolution. Subversive ideas about theory simply didn't belong.
The rediscovery of literature
A second problem for theory is theorists themselves. Fundamentalism is always ugly, and many of the secondgeneration professors who followed famed theoreticians like Derrida merely applied their ideas dogmatically, thus guaranteeing that theory would became static and stale. Eventually, theory's freewheeling skepticism became as one-dimensional as the celebrations of objective truth it sought to replace.
Somewhere in the 1980s, says Prof. Lathbury, "Eagleton began to be a hero to some" and "theory became the object of study more than the works it purportedly was designed to explicate."
But for some academics, what the rejection of theory is really about is the joyous rediscovery of literature itself. There is today "a renewed appreciation of the irreducible particularity of an art work, an author, an historical moment, a particularity that theory may illuminate but never fully explain," according to Dennis Todd, professor of British literature at Georgetown University.
Theory is also notoriously hard to anchor in the concrete world of books. A longstanding complaint about theoretical writing is that it contains so few examples.
And because it is vague, charge some, it allows teachers to shrink from admitting to personal views. "It presents itself as a way of thinking that exists by itself, and not the product of personal choices," says Edward Mendelson, professor of literature at Columbia University in New York. "Most people outgrow it when they stop feeling insecure or threatened."
But there are also those who suggest that theory is not dead but simply seeking new directions - some of which may prove as esoteric as the old.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. - star Ivy League academic who was recently the object of a turf battle between Harvard and Princeton Universities - is soon to publish "The Third World of Theory," a book that promises not only to extend literary study into uncharted pluralist and multicultural domains but also, according to the current Oxford University Press catalog, offer "a unifying statement about the future of theory."
At the same time, Franco Moretti of Stanford University is raising academic eyebrows with what some are calling the ultimate "anti-theory," a math-based or "text-free" scholarship that, rather than relying on a close reading of, say, the 200 canonical novels of the Victorian era, will attempt to quantify precisely the total number of novels published in that period (estimated at 20,000 or more) and categorize them according to genre.
Farewell, Karl Marx
Of course, no change is likely to occur at lightning speed. "Universities are remarkably conservative institutions," says S. E. Gontarski, professor of Irish studies at Florida State University.
"After some 20 years of careful hiring, they are now heavily packed with what we might now call old-line theorists." Before any real change can take place, he predicts, "it will take the retirement of that group."
But in the meantime, where Marx once ruled, today more down-to-earth literary explorations seem to be on the throne once more.
The Duke University English department's spring courses include such homey-sounding subjects as "Victorian Literature," " 'Ulysses' and Irish Modernism," and "Music in Literature and Philosophy, 1800-1945." The on-line list course offerings run to nearly 35 pages, and Karl Marx isn't mentioned once.
© 2004 The Christian Science Monitor