fbpx

The Theory Generation

Teju Cole. Open City. Random House. 2011.

Jennifer Egan. A Visit From the Goon Squad. Knopf. 2010.

Jeffrey Eugenides. The Marriage Plot. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2011.

Ben Lerner. Leaving the Atocha Station. Coffee House Press. 2011.

Sam Lipsyte. The Ask. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2010.

Lorrie Moore. A Gate at the Stairs. Knopf. 2010.

If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader, with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe they evoke shame (for having lost touch with them, or having never really read them); maybe they evoke disdain (for their preciousness, or their inability to solve tedious adult dilemmas); maybe they’re mute. But chances are that, of those studies, they are what remain. And you can walk into the homes of friends and experience the recognition, wanly amusing or embarrassing, of finding the very same books.

If so, you belong to what might be called the Theory Generation; and it has recently become evident that some of its members have been thinking back on their training. They are doing so, moreover, in a form older than Theory, a form that Theory has done much to denaturalize and demystify (OK, “deconstruct”): the more or less realist novel, which describes individual lives in a fairly linear manner in conventional, if elegant or well-crafted, prose. Take, for instance, the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, a young woman named Tassie raised in rural Wisconsin, who describes the shock of her first term at her state university:

Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of sunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie.

The deadpan Midwestern humor, so pointedly stark in its syntax, brilliantly evokes the moment of initiation into Theory: spoken over rather than spoken to, Tassie can only, at least at first, receive Theory as a style. Thad’s read his Eve Sedgwick; Moore clearly alludes to the public controversy surrounding Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” the 1989 MLA paper that became a touchstone for conservative think pieces about the decline of academic literary studies. That episode isn’t available to Tassie, however; for her it’s all just a conversation overheard — which encapsulates the constant state of Theory in the American classroom, where debates with concealed or unnamed interlocutors (Derrida with Marx; Foucault with Hegel) become a cacophony of crossed lines. What is audible to her is intonation, the grain of those theoretical voices. Put less metaphorically: the way professors dress and talk, the stylistic alternatives they offer.

More from Issue 14

Issue 14 Awkward Age

Of course, one man’s burden is another man’s opportunity. Student debt in the United States now exceeds $1 trillion.

Issue 14 Awkward Age

Big Baby may be reading Birther apocalyptic conspiracy tracts, but at least he’s reading.

Issue 14 Awkward Age

We have an elite with a “study abroad” worldview.

Issue 14 Awkward Age

What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed, you think, and favorite the tweet.

Issue 14 Awkward Age

Could a class be too big to win?

Issue 14 Awkward Age
Issue 14 Awkward Age

He needed someone to commit an act of mercy.

Issue 14 Awkward Age
Issue 14 Awkward Age
Issue 14 Awkward Age

Gentrification is turning vulnerable residents into tumbleweed, and it’s gradually transforming the Mission.

Issue 14 Awkward Age

Celebrity may disfigure personality, but it doesn’t obliterate it.

Issue 14 Awkward Age

The Yards, in some sense, created the District.

Issue 14 Awkward Age

Another wrote, “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora.”

Issue 14 Awkward Age

When intimacy is your model of success, it becomes easy to assume that everyone is either a friend or a traitor.

Issue 14 Awkward Age

Dear Editors, Your liberal fangs are showing.

More by this Author

August 11, 2010

For intellectuals to stake a claim on such things as “attention” or “concentration” is an abdication of our best ground.

Issue 31 Out There

No genre is more masculine than the spy story, more impervious to revisionary feminist versions.

June 5, 2020
Departures and Returns
Issue 8 Recessional

To admit to a fondness for, say, the Climax Blues Band is embarrassing in a more complicated way than it would at first seem.

Issue 11 Dual Power

What if a certain neurotic investment is really the source of the best intellectual work?

Issue 21 Throwback

Let’s face it: there’s nothing cool about someone else’s sentimentality.