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Reflecting, in 1978, on the responsibilities of the literary critic, Vincent B. Leitch observed that, “at bottom the critic is able to separate and choose (Greek—krinein). This conventional portrait is our inheritance and imprisonment.” Leitch’s first book, Deconstructive Criticism (1983), where this statement was reprinted, came out at a time when the U.S. departments of literary study were “especially embattled sites” as “different paradigms of interpretation and of curriculum were pitted against each other.” “Conventional” readers/critics longed—and many still do—for some simplicity in the midst of the theory wars that deflected attention away from works they admired and taught. Such simplicity, Leitch’s latest book reminds us, is wishful thinking in the new era of literary and cultural studies: there is no escape from theory, which “has become at once so ubiquitous and multifaceted that we academics have almost all increasingly become critical pasticheurs mixing and matching heterogeneous strands into usable materials.” That is why, if he were to occupy a Desert Island today, Leitch would have to bring not just one text to work with, but a “whole archive of hybridized theory,” comprising texts (such as the “theory favorites” discussed in the second chapter) that make up “the postmodern professional unconscious.”

Indeed, as Leitch argues, from the 1970s onwards, economics, politics, and culture have been “marked by disorganization, understood not as chaos but as “disaggregation.” How has the shift from theory as “disinterested objective inquiry into poetics and the history of literature” to theory as cultural critique occurred? How does theory position itself in relation to the numerous discrete subfields of cultural studies? What is the most adequate framework for constructing a history of contemporary theory, given the complex intermingling of theoretical trends and traditions defining it? These are only some of the most important questions raised by Theory Matters, an elegantly written and well-sustained commentary on the rich possibilities and potential limitations of interdisciplinary tendencies in literary and cultural criticism. The book’s title indicates its dual purpose. On the one hand, it examines “matters” pertaining to theory, i.e., theory’s vast, pluralized field of overlapping and/or competing paradigms, its inner “machinery,” interpretive apparatus and methodologies. On the other hand, at every point, this study in meta-theory stresses the [End Page 296] relevance of theoretical inquiry to the process of understanding culture in general, and literature in particular.

No longer a “coherent enterprise, field, or subfield,” theory has expanded its reach beyond poetics and literary criticism into non-literary disciplines (history, mythology, anthropology, philosophy, etc.). This expansion has occurred through “combination and proliferation” of disciplines (feminism, psychoanalysis, race studies, postcolonial criticism, fashion studies, narrative studies, and so on). Each of these disciplines has re-energized the field of literary theory to such an extent that, instead of mourning the so-called death of theory—as a stable and hegemonic discourse—Leitch celebrates its “renaissance” in the form of cultural studies—“the postmodern discipline par excellence, disorganized in the extreme.”

For those familiar with Leitch’s previous work, which is finely tuned to both Continental and American discourses, his strong commitment to theory is not surprising at all. The first part of Theory Matters offers a personal retrospective on the tumultuous changes undergone by academic literary studies, and, implicitly, by Leitch’s own professional development during the past three decades. Thus a brief overview of his previous publications allows Leitch to map the broad shift from formalism (1940-mid 1970s) to poststructuralism (1970–1990) to cultural studies (in the present) and to argue for an interpretive strategy that engages in “institutional, ideological, and cultural critique” without ignoring the “aesthetic dimension of cultural artifacts.” In chapter 4, Leitch critically examines five ways of “framing theory,” advocating a “mixture of more or less incommensurable microhistories of precursors, texts, issues, schools, and institutions”—that would accurately reflect the reconfiguration of literary studies “not as a master discipline but as a regional discourse amidst a host of others.”

As general editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001), Leitch sought to...