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Popular Culture Review
The rise of Theory in our field finds its root in the need to publish at all
costs that began to characterize the North American academic regime during the
late 1970s and took firm hold through the 1980s. As the policy of “publish or
perish” became the rule to access and retain tenured positions, an entire
generation of university professors found themselves in the uneasy position of
producing at least two revolutionary articles in their field per year to prove their
worth as academic researchers, that is, to retain their position. The essentially
unquantifiable, i.e., the qualities and merits of a faculty member, became
quantifiable through the amount of publications he or she could generate,
placing life depending decisions, such as that of awarding tenure or not, within a
simplistic arithmetic based on the number of titles published during the pre
tenure period.5
While there is not doubt than any professor of literature will come across
several important interpretative discoveries during her or his career, which, once
published, will represent meaningful contributions to her or his field, to expect
every member of every literature and language department in every single
university in the United State to produce several path-breaking essays on a
yearly basis seems unrealistic at best. A meaningful contribution to a specific
field in the Humanities represents a serious effort of intuition and research. By
attempting to quantify intuition and research and turning this quantification into
the most determining factor for professional survival, the policy of publish or
perish has successfully stifled true intuition and honest research, simultaneously
turning the contextualization and interpretation of literature in the classroom into
a very secondary priority. Incidentally, the task of evaluating faculty’s published
production in a qualitative manner has become increasingly difficult due to the
sheer number of publications as well as to their exponentially expanding variety;
when we consider, in addition, the heavy political slant which pervades today’s
critical inquiries and their often impenetrable over-conceptualized discourse, the
possibility for an objective, un-biased evaluation of any given essay seems more
remote than ever.
Theorize or Agonize
Post-modern Theory, often merged with the figure of Jacques Derrida, was
to provide professors of literature and languages with the tools for survival, and
hence was very successfully imported into the United States.6 It permitted the
satisfaction of the ever growing need for published production by offering an
over-conceptualized language, the obscurity of which legitimized a never before
seen flexibility in terms of actual content, as form triumphed and became its
own meaning. In other words, since no one could really be sure to understand
what was said, anything could be said and, more importantly, published, hence
fortifying faculty curricula and careers across the land. Through the use of post
modern discourse, “publish or perish” had become “theorize or agonize.”
The contextualization of the rise of theory is in itself very significant, for
Jacques Derrida is above all and foremost a philosopher, and the appropriation
of his work by literary studies is already somewhat suspicious. Although some