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As the Theory Era draws to a close, we need more than ever intelligent rumination and debate over what it all meant. THEORY'S EMPIRE was an important step in that direction. Framing THEORY'S EMPIRe carries on the conversation with sophistication and flair. -Denis Dutton

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Publié par	Parlor Press, LLC
Date de parution	16 novembre 2007
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781602356979
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Framing Theory’s Empire
Edited by John Holbo
a Valve book event
Parlor Press
Andeerson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621
Printed in the United States of America
© 2007 by Parlor Press.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License, with no prejudice to any material quoted from Theory’s Empire or other texts under fair use principles. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Framing Theory’s empire / edited by John Holbo.
p. cm.
“A Valve book event.”
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-60235-014-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-015-1 (adobe ebook)
1. Criticism. 2. Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc. I. Holbo, John, 1967-
PN81.F678 2007
801’.95--dc22
2007043878
The book you are holding— if you are holding a book—is available as a free PDF download. Visit http://www.parlorpress.com
This book was designed and edited by John Holbo. Text is set in 11 point Adobe Garamond Pro and printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Driver, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email editor@parlorpress.com.

Notes on the Text
Theory’s Empire , edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral is published by Columbia University Press (2005).
The pieces in this book were originally blog posts, part of a ‘book event’ focusing on Theory’s Empire , hosted mostly on the Valve (thevalve.org), mostly in July, 2005, mostly organized by me, John Holbo. (See the introduction for more information.)
Paper has been a bit of a puzzle. We have opted to make it typographically clear where links appear in the electronic version. Readers of the paper version who wish to follow links can download the PDF version of the book from Parlor Press, or check the original posts.
The material in this book is licensed under Creative Commons (see facing copyright page). What this means (to pick on the likeliest practical application) is that educators who wish to include a piece from this volume in a course reader, or make copies for classroom use, can do so freely, and without filling in annoying forms. This is, of course, a very legally imprecise statement. But it conveys the pragmatic point. We would like academics to become more aware of the fact that there is a legal device that permits such happy things.

Contents
Notes on the Text
Preface: Framing Framing Theory’s Empire
Scott McLemee
Introduction
John Holbo
1. Review of Theory’s Empire
Mark Bauerlein
2. Theory of Everything
Michael Bérubé
3. Theory’s Empire
John McGowan
4. Theory’s Empire,Making Sense of the Theme
John Holbo
5. Theory’s Empire: Ersatz Theoretical Ecumenism & Criticism qua Criticism
Scott Eric Kaufman
6. Theory Tuesday
Michael Bérubé
7. Theory’s Empire—Wrestling the Fog Bank
Sean McCann
8. Hostilities
Daniel Green
9. A Response to “The Deconstructive Angel”
Adam Kotsko
10. Theory Thursday
John McGowan
11. Book Notes: Theory’s Empire
Tim Burke
12. Four Challenges to Postcolonial Theory
Amardeep Singh
13. Why I love theory / Why I hate theory
Jonathan Mayhew
14. On Mark Bauerlein’s “Social Constructionism: Philosophy for the Academic Workplace”
Jonathan Goodwin
15. Post-Post-Theory
Chris Cagle
16. Essentializing Theory:A Testimonial
Christopher Conway
17. Anthropological Theory, Siglo XXI
Kathleen Lowrey
18.Two Months Before the Mast of Post-Modernism
Brad DeLong
19. Theory’s Empire—It’s the Institution, Stupid
Sean McCann
20. Theorizing Novels
Matthew Greenfield
21. Thinking About Theory’s Empire
Morris Dickstein
22. The Death & Discontents of Theory
Jeffrey Wallen
23. Trilling’s Taste, An Instance
Jonathan Goodwin
24. Teaching Theory’s Empire?
Jonathan Goodwin
25. Morally Sound
Daniel Green
26. Literary Studies Without Literature
John Emerson
27. Theory Tuesday III
Michael Bérubé
28. Bill the Butcher As Educator
John Holbo
29. T1 and t2?
Mark Kaplan
30. There Be Monsters—or, Rosa Parks: Not Psychotic
Sean McCann
31. What’s so scary about theory?
Jodi Dean
32. Prosthetic Thoughts
Mark Kaplan
33. Breaking News
Mark Kaplan
34. The Para-Costives
Mark Kaplan
35. Against My Better Judgment
Adam Kotsko
36. On Theory and its Empire, 2: The Politics of Capitalization
Kenneth Rufo
37. Conceptualization and its Vague Contents
John Holbo
38. Nussbaum v. Butler, Round One
John McGowan
39. Nussbaum v. Butler, Round Two
John McGowan
40. Nussbaum v. Butler,Footnotes
John Holbo
41. Afterword
Daphne Patai & Will H. Corral
Appendix: Links, Comments, & Context
Contributors

Preface: Framing Framing Theory’s Empire
Scott McLemee
The book now in your hands is the product (and/or simulacrum) of an online seminar. It consists of a few rounds of debate, tangential amplification, and afterthought—making this a peculiarly open-ended sort of document, one characterized by the noise of crosstalk, and by opened parentheses that, in some cases, never quite close. As a published work, then, it has a quality of improvisation and experiment. That is perhaps especially true at the level of format, for its very existence reflects a certain amount of shuttling and boundary-blurring between discursive venues.
We might call this a book about a book about books about methods of reading books. That would be putting things in a straightforward way. But in fact to frame Framing Theory’s Empire more precisely, we’d need to note that it is a volume of texts originally prepared for digital publication in response to a hefty anthology, Theory’s Empire , which consisted of reprinted texts from (paper-and-ink) journals and essay collections. That anthology in turn being a response to one more hefty still, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, the very title of which marks it as embedded in a kind of “branded” intertextuality we could spend no little time unpacking.
Furthermore, it may bear mentioning that Framing Theory’s Empire —unlike the other volumes it devolves from, or sublates, or interstitially situates—is being made available as an ebook that can be downloaded for free. This is not a small point. Its significance goes beyond novelty, or even the way it stages a (partial) withdrawal from publication as market process. The shuttling between print and digitality—between formal scholarly publication and some, at times, rather studiously informal modes of comment and elaboration—would be distinct enough if this volume were to exist only as a bound volume. Its further dissemination, gratis and all-digital, plants it in some more recursive niche.
In fact, nobody involved in writing the texts below or preparing the collection for publication has any idea when you will encounter this volume, or how. You might be reading it ten years from now, or fifty. You might be doing so in some format not known—or even quite imaginable—in 2007.
All of this bears mentioning if only because it was not always so. The opening salutation above (“The book now in your hands....”) would have been at one time would a pretty straightforward thing—a direct, literal way of pointing to a familiar, immediately present experience. It referred to a normative experience that could be taken for granted. Now it is haunted by meta. It points to a normative experience that is lost.
Well, maybe not lost—but one that has grown more complicated, anyway. And I suspect that complexity, and its discontents, may be part of the informing subtext of the material you will encounter in this book.
Debates over the genres, practices, and institutions we have come to call Theory took shape, over the final decades of the twentieth century, against a background of transformations in the circumstances that condition the experience of reading. (And also, just to be explicit about this, of writing.)
At one level, this should seem obvious. Nearly all discussions in the matter of Theory—whether in the form of expositions, polemics, defenses, or what have you—had their moment of narrative reconstruction. There were various stories, and ways of telling stories, about Theory as the response to shifts, large and small, in intellectual history (“Then the limitations of a merely