Jeffrey R. Di Leo - Whats Wrong with Antitheory?

Whats Wrong with Antitheory?

Whats Wrong with Antitheory?

Edited and with an introduction by

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

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First published in Great Britain 2020

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every generation produces some individuals exceptionally preoccupied with theory.

William James (1911)

The antitheory message to Theory is clear: get back where you belong, the appreciation of literature. Put first things first. Reverse the tragic decline. Restore the canon. Fall in line. Declare your love for literature. I love literature. Say it loud, I LOVE LITERATURE.

Vincent B. Leitch (2019)

Christopher Breu is Professor of English at Illinois State University, where he teaches classes in critical theory and contemporary literature and culture. He is the author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (2014) and Hard-Boiled Masculinities (2005). He is the coeditor of Noir Affect (forthcoming) and the recent Materialisms special issue of symplok. His work has also appeared in Cultural Critique, The Comparatist, Textual Practice, ELN, Callaloo, Twentieth-Century Literature, Humanities, Modern Fiction Studies, Men and Masculinities, and English Journal, among other places. He is currently at work on two monographs, one tentatively entitled, In Defense of Sex and the other, Infrastructure and Biopolitics.

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Houston-Victoria, USA. He is Editor of the American Book Review, Founding Editor of the journal symplok, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. His recent books include Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving beyond the Neoliberal Academy (2013), Criticism after Critique: Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political (2014), Dead Theory: Death, Derrida, and the Afterlife of Theory (2016), Higher Education under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct and the Neoliberal Condition (2017), American Literature as World Literature (2017), Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (2019), and The End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of Print (2019).

Tom Eyers is Associate Professor of Philosophy and English at Duquesne University. He is the author of three books: Lacan and the Concept of the Real (2012); Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology and Marxism in Postwar France (2013); and Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present (2017). Recent writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, boundary 2, Mediations, and Revue Internationale de la Philosophie. His next book has the title Romantic Abstraction.

Irving Goh is Presidents Assistant Professor of Literature at the National University of Singapore. He was recently Franke Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale in the fall of 2018. His first book, The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (2014), won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in French and Francophone Studies. His second monograph, Lexistence prpositionnelle, appeared in 2019. He is now completing his next monograph, Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit and working with Jean-Luc Nancy on a conversation book, The Deconstruction of Sex. His new project is on failure across French thought, affect theory, and contemporary literature.

Robin Truth Goodman is Professor of English at Florida State University. Her published works include: The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory (edited collection, 2019); Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt (2018); Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (2016); Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (edited collection, 2015); Gender Work: Feminism After Neoliberalism (2013); Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public: Women and the Re-Privatization of Labor (2010); Policing Narratives and the State of Terror (2009); World, Class, Women: Global Literature, Education, and Feminism (2004); Strange Love, or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (cowritten with Kenneth J. Saltman, 2002); and Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies (2001). She is currently editing another volume for Bloomsbury called Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism.

Christian P. Haines is Assistant Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons (2019) and the coeditor of a special issue of Cultural Critique, What Comes after the Subject? (2017). He is also a contributing editor for Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Hes currently writing a book on finance and culture titled, The Scored Life.

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is also on the faculty of Womens Studies and Film Studies at the Graduate Center. He is Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed (1992); Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (1999); Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (2003); The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (2010); The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere (2016; coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo); Labor in Culture, or, Worker of the World(s) (2017); and, most recently, The Debt Age (2018; coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Sophia McClennen). His next project is called The World, The State, and Postcoloniality.

Paul Allen Miller