The Institution of Theory.

Gross, David S.

The thin volume The Institution of Theory contains material first given as lectures in Taiwan in 1991. In it Murray Krieger presents a carefully constructed attack on New Historicism and deconstruction, and what he sees as their dominance of the (primarily academic) institutionalization of "theory" at the expense of "literature." It also continues the author's nearly forty-year defense, in many monographs, of a theory of literature which is based on the notion of art and literature as unique, highest-order cultural productions. For Krieger, things are simple: esthetic judgment and analysis reveal great works whose cultural power and significance are potentially redemptive, salvational.

What only literature can save us from, in Krieger's view, is the "ideological" - criticism and theory based on political loyalities and narrowly political analyses, in which literature is dismissed as only a direct reflection or manifestation of forces of social power. Thus for Krieger, good criticism, good theory, like real literature itself, is always anti-ideological. Moreover, the task of literature is the irreducible expression of one unique individual's nonimbrication in cultural forces which seek to stifle that free, individual expression.

There are some real strengths to Krieger's argument, as in his eloquent assertion that "the history of literature is the story of certain texts . . . that remain teasingly out there, with a fullness in a part or the whole of them that challenges all we think we have known until we meet them." But way too much of the book is taken up with arguing against what is basically a classic straw man - a position with regard to literature which I have never encountered except in the imaginings of William Bennett, George Will, or, sadly, Murray Krieger.

Further on in the sentence just cited, Krieger asserts that the "fullness" of literary works "contradicts all efforts to level them into common discourse." This fear of "leveling," the passionate defense of hierarchies, places Krieger in a tradition which goes back to before the French Revolution. Over and over again Krieger resorts to polemic against ideologically motivated criticism or theory which treats literary works "as no more than essentially undistorted reflections of their surrounding social and cultural contexts." He is alarmed about institutions of criticism and theory loyal only to "an ideological call to action that would repress anything that gets in the way." He is convinced that the New Historicism and poststructuralist deconstruction practice a reductionist criticism based on wrong-headed theory, in which art and culture are a direct "reflection" of ideological forces, having their source in the "political unconscious." In such arguments, it is Krieger's theory which is reductionist. I know of no important critics or theorists who defend the position Krieger constructs and attacks. To suggest that all of culture is infused with ideology is not to argue that only ideology is manifested in culture. To work from an "engaged position" does not require that the critic or theorist deny complexity, ambiguity, contradiction in the literary work or in its relation to its contexts.

When Krieger defends what he values as unique to works of literature, his argument is strong and quite convincing. The Institution of Theory is seriously flawed, however, by its reliance on a Stalinist caricature of contemporary critical theory. Most of its pages are dedicated to the destruction of a theoretical position which does not exist.

David S. Gross University of Oklahoma