ABSTRACT
In 1986, in his presidential address to the Modern Language Association of America, the Yale deconstructive critic J. Hillis Miller announced the ‘triumph of theory’. The theory wars which raged in British and North American universities in the 1970s and 1980s had ended in the apparent victory of the theorists, and Hillis Miller could claim that the triumph of theory was ‘almost universal’.1 But where next? What if theory had drawn its momentum and energy from the strength of the opposition to it? The triumph of theory might turn out to be only a hair’s breadth from its demise. In fact, in his presidential address Hillis Miller concentrates mostly on what he calls ‘a sudden, almost universal turn away from theory in the sense of an orientation toward language as such’.2 The moment of theory’s triumph was also the moment at which it could be consigned to the past. A series of books with titles such as In the Wake of Theory, The Wake of Deconstruction, After Theory, Reading after Theory and What’s Left of Theory? suggest that theory may be dead and gone.3 We are now ‘post-theoretical’, even if opinions differ on what this might mean.
