In the summer of 2002, I had the pleasure of teaching a six-week-long seminar at the Cornell-based School of Criticism and Theory. Founded twenty-five years earlier in order to provide younger academics and graduate students with a blitz introduction to "theory" (mainly French), it had evolved into a place where younger (and older) faculty and students well versed in theory came to work together. In this sense, the SCT is indicative of what has been often recently labeled the "death" of theory. It is clear that what has happened is that theory (now to be understood as the self-conscious awareness of the methodological approaches that one uses) has become an inherent part of not only most graduate programs in literature and culture but most published scholarship in these domains. In other words, the wish of twenty years ago when I was at the beginning of my own career that theory had to be taken seriously has been fulfilled. And yet there was a sense of discomfort among the graduate students and younger faculty. Not surprisingly, they asked (quietly and in private) about their own future, not in a world of high theory, but in the academy in general. Let me address both of these questions: the present state of theory and the present state of those institutions that have in general been the bastion of theory, the universities.

Let me begin with what I see as the accomplishments of the past twenty-five years and then return to this anxiety, which is real and which has the potential for undermining much of what we have accomplished. The promises (or threats) of the “cultural wars” have for the most part been fulfilled. Now, as with all wishes, this too comes with its own private poison pill. Theory no longer means continental (read, French) theory. Not Foucault but Benjamin is hot today; not Cixous but Agamben. Cultural studies has developed in directions unimagined by its Anglo-Marxist originators. Theory has truly become not only continental but also global. Not only are European and North American critics read throughout the world, but in Europe and North America critics are now reading more and more thinkers in (or at least from) the “rest" of the world. Indeed, the very line between these two arenas has vanished in the world of global theory and the theory of globalization. Is Anthony Appiah an American, an African, or a British theorist? Actually he is a global one in addition to being all three of these categories. Of equal importance is that the assumption of rational, critical self-consciousness, especially in those theories espousing the claims of the irrational (in the form of psyche, power, or society) as the motor of action has also been undone. Adorno has finally won his struggle with the Enlightenment, and this may well account for the fact that his stock has risen radically in the past few years, especially among feminist theorists. Few today believe that even with years of deep analysis or constant practice one can plumb the depths of all of one's motivation or reduce all phenomena to a single, common cause or form.

We have concomitantly seen the rise of biography as a substantial genre for the presentation of literary and cultural history. Our audience is interested in our narratives, and they demand that these be available to them. This may well signal our increased, posttheory desire for coherent narratives but also an attempt to plumb the critics’ projected self. (Luckily we have not had to suffer an explosion of novels by critics for this same reason. Biography is safer and still somewhat more legitimate than pure fiction.) This movement to biography has no small role in winning readers (and viewers) to complex, often contradictory presentations of lives and times. They are not engaged by the Rankean presentations of the facts of a life but rather by the unresolved underlying processes that biography seems at least to hint at if not reveal. (And we know how constructed that sense of revelation is!)

All of this points to the success of theory and its own limitations. Is “pure” theory being written today? The closeness of contemporary philosophy and literary studies is evident. But this theory often takes a very different form: in virtually every arena of literary and cultural studies, from new historical to feminist to Holocaust or postcolonial studies, theoretical questions frame presentations that are themselves substantive. Environmental criticism, globalization theory, the study of alternative modes of transmission of knowledge (such as the World Wide Web) generate and absorb theoretical models. They are often highly theoretical and use case studies to present complex theoretical issues, applicable to a wider range of topics, in the pursuit of any given specific study. Often the best theory today is found in these contexts.

Theory has even entered into the realm of professional education. The medical humanities have embraced the problems of narrative and theory as the core of a new discipline. No place else in professional education (including law where critical theory seems to have waned) is the training of professionals more affected than in medicine. Here one can find a model for the importance of theory as an inherent component of pedagogy. The very acts of reading and seeing in their most abstract and critical modes become one of the means by which young physicians are trained.

The medical humanities may also signal a more pragmatic move for the study of theory. Much of the reaction to theory in the study of literature has indeed been a greater emphasis on the aesthetic without much sense of whether this is a psychological or social phenomenon. In the medical humanities the stress, at least for the medical historians and narratologists, is how the tools of interpretation are inherent to the profession itself. Doctors interpret – they read signs and symptoms, generate and collect life histories. They are constantly dealing with real and constructed texts, which demand ethical, moral, scientific, and critical acumen. Unlike a reading of a literary text, the reading of a patient history has immediate consequences.

The model for the generation as well as the dissemination of knowledge is also placed into question. The literary theorist is a loner; following the Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Cixous, Spivak model, he or she may become a cult figure. This is often times the result of the deification of the individuality (read, originality) of the thinker; he or she does not engage in any true collaboration. (Deleuze and Guattari may be the exception to this older model.) This is the model that has dominated the humanities since the romantic image of the isolated poet and thinker. At the very same time, the laboratory arose as the way to generate scientific knowledge. Here collaborative work brings a group of specialists together (within or beyond a discipline) together to undertake a project greater in form, scope, depth, or complexity than any individual could undertake him or herself. This has been elegantly argued by Linda and Michael Hutcheon. ¹ Of course, a cult of personality may develop in science, but at least those individual scientists recognize the need to work together. The integration of theory means that this can now take place. With a clear awareness of how they work, specialists should now be able to join together to generate larger and more meaningful projects.

These projects may well not be disseminated in the form of the scholarly monograph or article. The conventionally published scholarly work by a single hand will probably remain standard in the humanities for the near future. But it is also clear that there are media that lend themselves to different forms of dissemination of humanistic scholarship. From web sites to exhibitions, from radio shows to innovative long distance pedagogical projects, from popular books to films, we now can reach well beyond the ever more circumscribed audience of the scholarly book. (And perhaps even generate new interest in scholarly books while we do this!) This is not a charge to water down or prostitute one’s academic credentials. It is a charge to work in a team with other scholars and media specialists who can help shape one's scholarly work for a different, broader, or more critical audience. The “death” of theory seems to have been paralleled by the “death” of the book. But the reality is that theory has not died but has metamorphosed into different projects and forms; so too must we imagine the future for alternative forms for the dissemination of humanistic knowledge.

The integration of theory means a chance to undertake such larger projects for a broader audience. We who claim to know about theory also know about media, about performance, about film; we are learning daily more about the infinite pleasures and dangers of the web. And all of this is true in the global arena that the academy has become because our works and our presence is transmitted not only by books but on the world wide web, on television, on radio, in exhibits as well as through our published work. This has been recognized internationally. In July 2001 the Canadian SSHRC funded a major study of the future of the humanities that pushed us to think in this direction. In the United Kingdom the Twentieth-First Century Trust this year stated this as the goals of the new global university in which the “questions relating to resources allocation between science, technology, and the humanities” demanded a rethinking of the “distribution of academic resources, or even entire institutions, between research and teaching.” How the humanities generates and transmits knowledge will be central to this rethinking. The basic questions reflect on the changing nature of what we expect universities and more particularly what we expect the humanities to be able to accomplish.

We need to think more intensely how our wider theoretical expertise can, indeed must mesh with alternative forms for the presentation of humanistic knowledge and experience. In some areas, such as the medical humanities, this has already taken place, if still in a tentative way. We are entering into a most fruitful epoch for the humanities, assuming we see the changes that have and will take place as positive ones. Demanding that the successes of the past be the goals of the future is not only wrong-headed but also self-defeating. Let us plan for a new future because of the anxiety-filled realities of today. And yet in 2003 there is a poison pill in our planning for this future for the production of knowledge and its dissemination within and beyond the classroom. The realities of the economy both within and beyond the academy must play a role. Everything that I have outlined as gains for a self-conscious rethinking of the role of theory in the humanities is dependent on the existence of universities that are flexible enough to acknowledge change and to address the pragmatic implications of what it means to have new models for teaching and research added to the existing models. What has happened in the past few years is something that I (in a Cassandra-like voice) warned about in my book The Fortunes of the Humanities. ² We are again confronted with economic retrenchment, which is also impacting on higher education in a form of intellectual retrenchment. Our younger colleagues seek for jobs. These jobs are not to be found in any great numbers, and when they are found tend to be positions that seem to demand everything and offer little sense of direction and permanence. Our administrators fall back on old, well-worn educational models that they believe to be a means of reducing costs while increasing productivity. Our colleagues bury their heads in the sand and seek solace that this too shall pass.

The promises of interdisciplinarity, of transdisciplinarity, of theory, of collaboration seem to be stymied by the heightened demands of departments to cover areas that are absolutely necessary to be taught, without asking why they are perceived as necessary. We respond to the corporatization of the university by bemoaning the question of productivity rather than asking how we can rethink what it means to be productive in the university setting as well as in the greater world. The paradigms introduced are those of the 1950s rather than those of the present. They fulfill neither the needs of students for knowledge that is structured and presented as part of their world nor does it provide materials for pedagogical use that reflects the new interests, needs, and abilities of the elites that we are training. For without innovative research in the humanities, what will we teach in our classes? How will we teach? The models that have reappeared are not “conservative” but rather retrograde as they are introduced without any true thought of what can be accomplished for teaching and research within these models today. Thus the call has come out for us to teach larger and larger lecture courses as the size of the faculty decreases. This was never very effective in 1950s, but in an age of electronic media it is absurd. The anxiety about the future has pushed us back into models of the past. Rather than thinking about collaboration with web designers and using the web we cram students knee to knee in over crowded lecture halls to take notes on their portable computers rather than using them in new and extraordinary ways. And this in the age of a "postindustrial" or "information economy." Rather than bringing new colleagues and graduate students in to reenforce the older models, let us imagine incorporating them into new ways of producing and disseminating knowledge, including in rethinking the very notion of the classroom.

There is a small chance that the economic downturn will have a different impact on the model of the dissemination of knowledge that I am advocating. But the same economic retrenchment has hit academic publishers and journals. The function that these have had as the institutions that provided the seal of acceptance for tenure, promotion, and raises has been abandoned. The cry is heard: “How do I get tenure if you won’t publish my book?” Publishers and editors respond that that has never been their obligation, even though the academy has used them for this purpose. Perhaps the pragmatic need to (1) use the existing faculty; (2) rethink models for raises, promotion, and tenure; and (3) deal with many fewer new faculty will force universities into examining how the university is structured and what the role of new models could be. We have gotten to the point where Booker T. Washington’s admonition to “cast down your bucket where you are” is coming to be the operating philosophy of most institutions of higher education. When new colleagues are added, and that will be less and less often, it should be in the light of adding individuals to the total mix for innovative teaching and scholarship based on the quality of the existing faculty. One cannot fill holes when the fabric unravels completely. One needs to weave a new garment out of the existing threads. Here the function of the humanities as the fields where theories of meaning and analysis as well as methodologies that are of use across multiple objects of study and teaching may well be of greater importance than we have seen in the past.

The irony is that while the impetus is to fear the future, to doubt our ability to impact it, to encourage our students to accept models of scholarship that we believe are coming to an end for “pragmatic” reasons, we should be using this moment to rethink what we are doing and why we are doing it. Times of stress should enable us to rethink in ways that times of excess do not. Here the role of the humanities must be paramount. We have models for the humanities that can change the way the university functions. We have the ability to use times of intense confrontation to provide new and exciting experiments. Even if the motivation is a challenged economy, we can use this as a well spring for positive and forward looking undertakings. Thus communities may well need to think of the university as part of a world of education and the production of knowledge that is better integrated with other such institutions such as museums, adult education structures, public television and radio, and so on. Here the impetus may be cost cutting, but collaboration across traditional boundaries is the direct result. The boundaries between the older models that divided the world into separate spheres for the creation and dissemination of knowledge will begin to alter.

Thus we are confronted with the promises as well as the anxieties about the academic world that we inhabit or that we desire to inhabit. We have created a world that offers the potential for unimagined directions now inhibited by not only by the realities of the economy but also by our collective responses to it. Let us make this the best rather than the worst of times!