Outside the Frame of Theory

There was a moment in the 1970s when academics, with the best of intentions, made the humanities, and particularly the literature department, a ground for advancing political agendas. As “theory” achieved remarkable success within academia, it had the inevitable consequence of pushing the work of art further and further into the shadows, leaving the last fin de siècle with, a far cry from l’art pour l’art, theory for theory’s sake. While these modes of criticism had an untrammelled reign for more than two decades, serious schisms began to form within the humanities in the late 1990s as critics on all ends of the political spectrum began to resist. Legates of Adorno argued that historical and sociological analyses of art should only stand alongside, and perhaps even spring from, the work itself. The aesthetes that remained in the humanities lamented the replacement of aesthetic criteria with political ones, and the subsequent free fall in the social and intellectual standards of taste. Harold Bloom famously, and much to their chagrin, grouped all the “Theorists” with a capital ‘T’ into what he called the “School of Resentment,” asking them for a departmental divorce. As time passed and critique and theory have slowly lost their dominance, a strong successor is yet to be found, and they have only left, after a loud scream, an anarchic din. This conference will explore what lies ahead, and whether the work of art can gain once more the pre-eminence it once had, as the humanities try to find their voice.