Send Your Kids to the Jungles of Theory: An Alternative Narrative of the Humanities Crisis

This article seeks to synthesize two histories of praxis in the American university: the “crisis in the humanities” and the rise and fall of “French Theory”. The former, characterized by declining enrollment and professorial job prospects, has been primarily analyzed as the result of a neoliberal turn (Delbanco, Deresiewicz, Kerr, Menand). Such discussions remain largely divorced from intellectual history work on the transatlantic reception of theoretical schools (Culler, Eagleton, Leitch). By homing in on a subset of Literary Theory, the anachronistically-labeled “French Theory”, I argue these stories should be linked. Contrary to what many polemics contend, the banalization of theory can be seen as a victim, not a cause, of today’s crisis in liberal arts education.