ABSTRACT
Plying between historical survey and personal reminiscences, this essay attempts to contextualise the waning affect of once-popular (French) theory in UK academia. Starting with Wellek and Warren’s precursor study Theory of Literature, it first reviews the gradual import of critical strands that shaped the academic landscape in English Departments from the 1970s onwards. It then examines how new continental ideas (mainly structuralism and poststructuralism) had to be reshaped and institutionalised to make their mark on UK academia, as well as on the discrepancy between an imported version of ‘theory’ and what théorie meant in French universities, before looking at the emergence of ‘post-theory’ in spite of how theory lived on and diversified into many new critical practices. The final section makes a plea for theory as a tool of political resistance against those managerial ideologies that attempt to commodify thought in higher education.
