Review: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory—The Johns Hopkins Guide

Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide #

Edited by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012

Groden, Michael, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman, eds. 2012. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-0639-8.

Open the table of contents and the whole drama of this volume is already on stage: Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) stands at the head of the alphabet, Slavoj Žižek closes it, and between them persons, schools, methods, and movements jostle as though they belonged to a single genus. In this review, I will argue that Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide succeeds pedagogically and stumbles architecturally by showing how its alphabetical arrangement, run over persons and concepts alike, scatters the very connections a newcomer most needs to see. Distilled from the first (1994) and second (2005) editions of the larger Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism and from that project's annually updated online version, this desktop edition gathers eighty alphabetically arranged entries drawn from the work of over one hundred contributors. The editors' stated aim, to make "accessible in clear and concise form a body of material that has become overwhelming," reflects a genuine and welcome pedagogical impulse; for graduate students, early-career scholars, and practitioners in adjacent disciplines seeking orientation, the volume delivers real value. While the entries themselves show consistent strength, I argue that the book's structural flaw announces itself before the reader finishes the table of contents, and this flaw deserves dwelling on precisely because so much of what the book contains remains good.

What the table of contents confesses #

The contents page announces both the guide's ambitions and its confusions. It runs from Adorno at the head of the alphabet to Žižek at the end, and along the way it interleaves two fundamentally different kinds of entry. Some treat individuals: Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Terry Eagleton, Sigmund Freud, Antonio Gramsci, Donna Haraway, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Raymond Williams. Others treat themes, schools, theories, and methods: "Deconstruction," "Postcolonial Studies," "Cultural Studies," "Feminist Theory and Criticism," "Marxist Theory and Criticism," "Psychoanalytic Theory and Criticism," "Narratology," "Semiotics," "Discourse," "Ethics," "Ecocriticism," "Globalization," "New Historicism," "Queer Theory and Criticism," "Race and Ethnicity," and "Science Studies." Several of the thematic entries subdivide further into historical phases; Feminist Theory splits into five, Postcolonial Studies into two ("Origins to the 1980s" and "1990 and After"), Marxist Theory into "Classical Marxism," "Structuralist Marxism," and "1989 and After."

Taken on their own terms, both categories of entry show real care. The individual entries are biographical and genealogical; the thematic entries are synthetic and historical. In my estimation, the trouble lies elsewhere: the book never decides which kind of reference work it wants to be, and the alphabetical sort papers over the indecision rather than resolving it.

The alphabet is the book's central weakness #

An A-to-Z arrangement is the natural choice for a dictionary, where every headword belongs to the same category and the reader arrives already knowing the term. It is a poor choice for a guide whose entries slide between persons and concepts, because the two categories do not sort against each other in any meaningful way. Placing "Ecocriticism," "Ethics," and "Terry Eagleton" in sequence under the letter E tells the reader nothing except that three unrelated things happen to begin with the same letter. The ordering is arbitrary in the strict sense; it carries no intellectual information.

Worse, the alphabet actively scatters material that constellates naturally. Consider Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). His entry sits under G, but the concepts he is indispensable to (hegemony, the role of intellectuals, the subaltern) develop across the entries on Cultural Studies (C), Marxist Theory and Criticism (M), Postcolonial Studies (P), and in the entry on Terry Eagleton (E), whose own "see also" cross-references point straight back to Gramsci. A reader who wants Gramsci's actual footprint in literary and cultural theory must therefore visit at least five widely separated entries and reassemble the constellation alone. The same fragmentation afflicts Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), filed under F but conceptually inseparable from Postcolonial Studies (P), Race and Ethnicity (R), Said (S), Spivak (S), and Bhabha (B). Most tellingly, Donna Haraway receives her own entry, yet her most substantial treatment in the volume (the cyborg, cyberfeminism, the "informatics of domination") actually unfolds inside the entry on Science Studies, a placement the table of contents gives the reader no way of anticipating. The alphabet promises a single address for each subject and then quietly disperses the subject across the building.

The deeper issue is the mixing of granularities. "Discourse" could name a person or a concept; a newcomer scanning the contents cannot tell without turning to the page. "Structuralism" (a method) sits near "Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak" (a person) and "Speech Acts" (a philosophical topic) with no signal that these operate at different levels of abstraction. A reference work aimed explicitly at readers who "do not have specialized knowledge" (the audience the preface names) addresses exactly the audience least equipped to supply the missing categories on its own.

The remedy was available, and the editors did not take it. They should have picked one principle and committed to it: 1) a purely conceptual organization, entries on theories, schools, and methods, with individuals folded in as they arise and reached through the index, which would have produced a genuine map of the field, one in which Gramsci appears wherever hegemony appears rather than marooned under G; 2) a purely biographical organization, people only, all theory delivered through its exponents, which would at least have been internally consistent and would have matched the "great thinkers" model many readers arrive expecting; or 3) a thematic clustering with the alphabet retained within each cluster, an improvement even in this modest form. Instead the guide runs a dictionary sort over a non-dictionary set of objects, and the reader pays the cost in navigation. The elaborate cross-referencing apparatus, the "see also" tags, and the twin indexes of names and topics function, in effect, as compensations for an organizing decision that created the very problem they exist to solve.

Why much of it still earns its place, fourteen years on #

None of this should obscure how much of the volume remains genuinely useful, and here the guide's age works less against it than one might fear. Theory dates unevenly; the frontier moves quickly, but the foundations do not, and a large share of these entries treat figures and movements that have simply become part of the permanent furniture of the humanities.

The entry on Adorno makes a good test case. It situates him within the Frankfurt School and the neo-Marxist critical theory he rebuilds with Horkheimer, and it reads his relatively small body of literary criticism through the major philosophical works (Dialectic of Enlightenment, Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory). That account was true in 2012 and remains true now; Adorno's coordinates have not shifted. The same holds for Freud, Saussure, Benjamin, Lukács, and Bakhtin. These are historical entries in the best sense, and history is precisely the thing that does not go stale.

The entry on Fanon proves similarly durable. It moves from his biography (Martinique, psychiatric training in France, service and then defection during the Algerian war) to the books that became "primers and manifestoes for Third World national liberation movements," and it lays out his influential three-stage theory of the evolution of colonized literatures, from imitative apprenticeship, through nationalist rejection, to a genuinely revolutionary "fighting" literature. The entry candidly notes that the schema has often been "rather schematically" applied, which is exactly the kind of judgment a newcomer needs, and it registers Fanon's prefiguring of later preoccupations with subject formation, otherness, and identity politics without anachronism.

The Gramsci entry gives the necessary life (the turn from literature and linguistics at Turin to Communist Party organizing, the fascist imprisonment, the thirty-three notebooks composed under the censor's eye) and outlines his ambitious analysis of how ruling classes secure power over subaltern groups "through coercion and consent." That framing remains the standard entry ramp to Gramsci for a reason. The Eagleton entry is unusually rich on intellectual formation; it traces his early "Marxist-Catholic phase," his formative dialogue with Raymond Williams, and his career-long preoccupation with the meaning and value of culture, and it even notes how his early work on modernism and English identity "anticipates the much later emergence of a more explicit postcolonial theorizing."

The thematic entries hold up comparably well where they treat settled material. The Deconstruction entry clarifies precisely because it periodizes: it distinguishes the first phase, from 1966 through the early 1980s, dominated by Derrida, de Man, and the Yale critics, from the later "deconstruction and x" phase (deconstruction and feminism, and psychoanalysis, and Marxism) in which the reading techniques migrate into other fields, with Barbara Johnson as the exemplary second-generation figure. That architecture genuinely serves a beginner. The Kristeva entry patiently explains "semanalysis" as her fusion of Saussurean semiotics with Freudian psychoanalysis, and her project of returning the drive-laden speaking body to a linguistics she regarded as necrophilic; difficult ideas arrive legible without being flattened. The Postcolonial Studies and Haraway entries perform the same service for their subjects.

The phased thematic entries deserve particular credit here, because periodization is the one editorial device that turns an alphabetical list into something like a history. The five-part treatment of Feminist Theory and Criticism, moving from movement critique through Anglo-American and poststructuralist feminisms to materialist feminism and "1990 and After," gives a beginner a chronology and a set of internal debates rather than a single undifferentiated position. Likewise the three-part Marxist Theory entry and the two-part Postcolonial Studies entry. These are the moments when the guide does what a guide should do, showing not just what a school believes but how it argued with itself over time, and they are exactly the parts a teacher can hand to a student with confidence.

What makes these entries last is the editors' contextual method. Rather than offering isolated definitions, they enlisted specialists able to place each subject "in the context of the larger intellectual environment." An entry on Kristeva traces her genealogy through Saussure and Freud rather than merely cataloguing her terms; an entry on Deconstruction narrates a movement's phases rather than freezing it into a slogan. Context ages far more slowly than coverage does, and the selective primary-source bibliographies remain a practical resource regardless of what has appeared since. In fairness, the navigation apparatus, whatever its origins as a workaround, functions well in practice: the systematic cross-references, the "see also" tags at the foot of each entry, and the paired indexes of names and topics do let a determined reader trace hegemony or the subaltern across the volume. The tools work; they simply should not have to carry as much of the load as the alphabetical arrangement forces upon them.

The limits of a 2012 snapshot #

The guide is nonetheless a photograph of theory taken in 2012, and the reader should hold it as such. As a compressed desktop edition it sacrifices depth its larger predecessors carried, and the print text necessarily excludes what has gained prominence in the intervening years: the maturation of the environmental humanities and new materialism, the affective and computational turns, decolonial theory, developments in Black studies such as Afropessimism, and much of the digital humanities beyond Franco Moretti's early distant reading. The editors are admirably frank about this lacuna; they concede that "no principle of organizing information is altogether theoretically or ideologically innocent," and they point readers to the continuously updated online edition for the currency the printed volume cannot supply.

Verdict #

Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory succeeds at its core purpose: it makes a forbidding field legible without cheapening it, and its best entries (Adorno, Fanon, Gramsci, Eagleton, Kristeva, Deconstruction, Postcolonial Studies, Haraway) remain reliable first stops more than a decade after publication, because they build on context and history rather than on the passing frontier. The guide earns a place on the desk of any student or teacher orienting themselves in theory. It would have earned a more prominent one had the editors resolved the tension its own contents page exposes and chosen a single organizing principle instead of running an alphabet over objects too various to sort. In my estimation, the material is strong enough that the reader forgives the architecture; a firmer architecture would have made the material shine.