Volume 51, Number 9 · May 27, 2004
Goodbye to All That
By David Lodge
After Theory
by Terry Eagleton
Basic Books, 231 pp., $25.00
After Theory, by Terry Eagleton... Anyone who served on the academic front of the culture wars in the closing decades of the twentieth century is likely to prick up his ears and experience a kind of mental salivation at this conjunction of author and title. 'Theory' (with a capital T, and/or scare quotes) is the loose and capacious term generally used to refer to the academic discourses which arose out of the impact of structuralism, and more particularly post-structuralism, on the humanities (or 'human sciences' as academics in continental Europe, where it all started, prefer to call them). Key figures in its evolution were Ro-land Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, who subjected the methodologies of the founding fathers of structuralism, such as Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, and the work of other seminal modern thinkers like Marx and Freud, to a scrutiny that was at once critical and creative. One might say that Theory began when theory itself began to be theorized—or, in the buzz word of the day, 'deconstructed.'
Review, 5330 words
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