Extract
Christ and critical theory.
The current condition of cultural theory should evoke Christian pity and concern. Cultural theorists today lack the theoretical resources necessary for interesting intellectual work; and they are nostalgic for a lost golden age (the 1960s and some of the '70s) in which those resources seemed to be both available and usable for the transformation of society. That the pathos of this condition is evident to those inside the discipline as well as to those outside is suggested by the increasing number of histories of the theoretical excitements of the past forty years with mournful titles like Terry Eagleton's After Theory (2004). It is also suggested by the frequency with which cultural theorists are now turning to analysis and exposition of the conceptual resources and classic texts of Christianity as prompts and supports for their own work. This should not surprise Christians: our intellectual tradition is long-lived, rich, and subtle, and any attempt by European thinkers to do without it is not likely to last. But there is more to this renewed interest in Christianity by cultural critics, I think, and the best word for that extra element is "yearning."
Forty years or so ago, somewhere around Philip Larkin's annus mirabilis of 1963 ("Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban/And the Beatles' first LP"), new theoretical movements began to stir in Europe. They began in grand style, growing out of (and in part rejecting) the formalistic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure (in linguistics), Claude Levi-Strauss (in anthropology), and Roman Jakobson (in literary theory). To this they married the new Marxism of the postwar European left, for which Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno were numinous figures; and, as political excitements grew more intense in France, those manning the barricades in 1968 were often also the high priests (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan) of these new theoretical movements, now beginning to be called postmodern and post-structuralist, and soon to spawn yet more offspring: new historicism, post-colonialism, subaltern studies, and, eventually and most broadly, cultural theory, which is now becoming the preferred label in the American university for the humanities in general. The "culture" in "cultural theory" can mean just about...See the full content of this document
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