Professional Documents
Culture Documents
bibliography | 287
contributors | 299
index | 303
vi Contents
acknowledgments
This volume had the support of our home institutions, St. Francis Xavier
University and the University of Mississippi, but it would have been impos-
sible without the assistance of a number of people we are glad to have the
chance to thank publicly. We are particularly grateful to Frances Ferguson,
who backed this project from its inception and provided assistance in count-
less ways over the course of its production. Frances is awesome. Neil Hertz
and Jonathan Arac were also early boosters, and we appreciate their support.
Courtney Berger has been terrific to work with. We would like to thank her and
Duke University Press’s two anonymous readers for their many helpful com-
ments and suggestions. We’d also like to thank: Jessica Ryan for seeing the
manuscript through DUP’s editorial process; Amy Buchanan for her art de-
sign; and Mark Mastromarino for indexing the collection. We are very grateful
to Hal Sedgwick and Jonathan Goldberg for allowing us to include a previously
unpublished essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; we are honored to have it as part
of this collection and appreciate the work they did in locating it in her archive.
We would also like to thank our many friends and teachers for their encourage-
ment and engagement. Katie Arthur and Cristie Ellis patiently put up with us
throughout this process and generously allowed us to benefit from their bright-
minded insights at many turns.
This volume is dedicated to our parents, John and Lora Stout and Pat and
John Potts, for their unflagging support and for encouraging us to think other-
wise, even when it was clear it almost assuredly wasn’t going to pay.
introduction
On the Side: Allocations of Attention
in the Theoretical Moment
Notes
1. Elliott and Attridge, “Introduction,” 3.
2. Surin, “Introduction,” 5
3. Eagleton, After Theory, 1.
4. For a discussion of the relations between theory’s intellectual avant-garde-ism
and the publishing industry’s commodification, see Osborne, “Philosophy after The-
ory.” For an account of the star system, see David Shumway, “The Star System in Literary
Studies,” pmla 112 (January 1997): 85–100.
5. Elliott and Attridge, “Introduction,” 4, 14.
6. Cultural theory, of course, is not the only institution that has sought to conceive
itself almost entirely as a set of paradigm shifts. The desire to rethink from the ground
up—to be a disruptive technology—is ubiquitous, visible in everything from ted Talks
to think tanks like the Breakthrough Institute, which is set up to be something like an
incubator for unprecedentedness. The Breakthrough Institute’s mission was born out of
a familiar sense of formal exhaustion—“We believe that today’s political dysfunction
reflects the exhaustion of older paradigms”—and offers an entirely formal rejuvenation:
For quite a long time I had been thinking about the literary canon, its intellec-
tual and institutional status, finding the whole issue to be far more compli-
cated than anybody seemed to have supposed. I presented a brief paper on the
subject to the Modern Language Association meeting of 1974, and developed
the theme in a lecture of 1978; both are included in The Art of Telling. But before
that book appeared the topic of canon had quite spontaneously risen to some-
where near the top of the theoretical agenda. A whole issue of Critical Inquiry,
later published in augmented form as a book, was dedicated to the problem.
W. J. T. Mitchell, the editor of the journal, told me he had not planned such an
issue, that the contributions had simply arrived on his desk, as if the existence
of the topic, and its contentiousness, had mysteriously and simultaneously de-
clared itself everywhere and to everybody. In fact there is no real mystery, for
the transfer of attention from works of literature to modes of signification, a
transfer required by most modern critical theory, was bound to raise the ques-
tion of literary value. (2)
33. In addition to Wolfe and Farred, see, for instance, Michael Naas, “ ‘Now Smile’:
Recent Developments in Jacques Derrida’s Work on Photography,” South Atlantic Quarterly
110.1 (2011): 205–22; Martin Hägglund, “The Arche-Materiality of Time: Deconstruction,
Evolution and Speculative Materialism,” in Elliott and Attridge, Theory After ‘Theory,’
265–77.
34. Wolfe, “Theory as a Research Program,” 35.
35. Rasch, “Theory after Critical Theory,” 58. In Farred’s account this is described as
thought’s movement through a discipline (“ ‘Science Does Not Think,’ ” 73).
36. Rasch, “Theory after Critical Theory,” 58, 57.
37. Terada, “The Frailty of the Ontic,” 43, 44.
38. It thus may go without saying that the prospect in which theory lives and then dies
and then lives again (ad infinitum)—what the subtitle of Elliott and Attridge’s introduc-
tion calls “theory’s nine lives,” for instance—doesn’t, for us, really alter the picture.