1966 The academic ‘discipline’ of literary criticism, and the departments in which it finds its traditional home, are generational in their doctrines. That is to say critical orthodoxies tend to rule for the average length of a full academic career – 40 years.
After its emergence as a respectable subject in American universities in the 1890s, the dominant orthodoxy was ‘Philology’ (i.e. applying to native literature the same kind of analysis that was applied to ancient Greek and Latin). This was replaced (after fierce quarrelling between old and new guards) by ‘New Criticism’ – strenuous analysis of ‘words on the page’. Leading figures were Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in the US and, with a slightly different accent, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis in the UK.
By the 1960s another generational turn was due. The New Criticism was Old Hat. It happened on 21 October 1966, when Jacques Derrida gave his lecture ‘La Structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’ at the International Colloquium on Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Derrida had travelled from France with Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan, two other foundational figures in what would be called (misleadingly) ‘Theory’. Initially derided as ‘higher Froggy nonsense’, the new approach took off like wildfire among the younger American faculty. As they progressed upwards through the academic ranks, it became orthodoxy.
‘Theory’ redefined not just critical procedure but a new, expanded terrain. It was international and cross-disciplinary. Its branches – semiology, poststructuralism, deconstruction – drew on the work of Swiss linguists such as Saussure, Italians such as Umberto Eco (virtuoso in what Derrida called jeu, or ‘play’), German New-Marxists (such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger), social scientists such as the Bulgarian Tzvetan Todorov, and psychoanalysts such as Lacan. Barthes and Derrida were as engaged with philosophical problems as traditional explication de texte.
Essentially ‘Theory’ represented a turn back to what Aristotle called ‘Poetics’ – the question of how meaning is generated by permutations of small black marks on a white surface. Theory (particularly ‘deconstruction’) tended to lose itself in the problem of how fixed, or arbitrary, or limitlessly ‘decentred’ those meanings might be.
The proceedings of the 1966 event were printed up as The Structuralist Controversy. Theory would certainly be controversial, but it soon became the main item on the academic literary agenda. J. Hillis Miller was teaching at Johns Hopkins in 1966 and recorded that his first encounter with Derrida at the conference was ‘a decisive moment in my life’. Paul de Man (Belgian by origin, and a comparatist by training) was also at the conference, where he too met Derrida for the first time. He and Miller (along with Geoffrey Hartman) set up their base at Yale, which became, after 1970, the HQ of American Theory.
Forty years on, the Academy is due for its next critical revolution.