American literary theory developed in isolation from revolutionary political history

Evidence

It is symptomatic of the whole drift of American Left Criticism that Frank Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), surely the central and in some ways a genuinely brilliant summation of the vast changes that have occurred in US literary criticism and theory in the two key decades between 1957 and 1977, makes scant effort to locate the disciplinary developments in any history other than the literary-theoretical. It is only by holding on to one’s own memory and by fixing this memory on stray remarks here and there that one recalls, while reading the book, that these same twenty years were known in other kinds of narratives for quite other sorts of developments, such as the revolutions in Algeria, Cuba, Indochina and Southern Africa. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 657

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the same methodological critique the reader has seen across the wider book: disciplinary history detached from material politics. Connects to the general theme that post-structuralist theory brackets political economy. — connects to: Academic theory domesticated 1960s political dissent into textual culture — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 23; Western literary theory’s political turn originated in crises from anti-colonial wars — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 243

Related

• Western literary theory’s political turn originated in crises from anti-colonial wars (similarity 0.88)
• Academic theory domesticated 1960s political dissent into textual culture (similarity 0.85)
• Literary theory after 1960 retained literary specialness while denying the world outside text (similarity 0.83)
• American deconstruction stripped political radicalism from French theory into a hermetic textual technology. (similarity 0.82)
• Third World literary theory’s rise marked retreat from activist anti-imperialism (similarity 0.82)
• Post-1968 literary theory abandoned solidarity with labor movements (similarity 0.81)
• French colonial defeats and occupation, not Asian decolonization, radicalized Western literary theory (similarity 0.81)
• Postcolonial theory’s turn to representation displaced study of imperialist political economy (similarity 0.81)
• Postcolonial literary theory obscures the political and economic materialities determining it (similarity 0.80)
• Postcolonial theory recasts decolonization as a literary-critical rather than political contest (similarity 0.80)
• No properly Marxist literary culture has been built in the USA despite postwar gains. (similarity 0.80)
• The New Left crystallized in 1967-68 after divergent national origins (similarity 0.80)
• Poststructuralism’s rise in colonial literary theory conceals rather than explains its material-economic context (similarity 0.79)
• Post-1968 Western radicalism abandoned belief in domestic socialist revolution (similarity 0.79)
• Theory’s ideological shifts track the real fortunes of decolonized states (similarity 0.79)