Global Thinking, Local Teaching: Departments, Curricula, and Culture

Thinking through the relation between theory and teaching cannot be a matter of prescriptively determin ing how teaching ought to look in order to be judged adequate by theory. To do so would both underestimate the variability of classroom practices and overestimate the power of the theoretical imagination. Instead of a conceptualizing hierarchy that puts teaching in the back of the bus and leaves the driving to theory, I propose an examination of the more complex and very material effect of the several discourses we call theory on the practices of teaching in language and literature depart ments. Theory here is not at all primarily pedagogical theory but rather the open-ended set of paradigms that have forced a fundamental rethinking of the study of the humanities. This theory, including the incompati bles of poststructuralism, neo-Marxism, feminism, and postcolonialism, to name a few, has most strongly af fected departments traditionally devoted to literature, although it pertains just as well to other humanistic dis ciplines. The question I want to explore is how the larger theoretical revolution, with its epicenter in the language and literature departments, elicits structural conse quences for these departments, for the curricula that are taught, and for the understanding of culture as the topic of teaching. The irreversible transformation in the per ception of the field may be fundamentally at odds with the conventional structures of the departments. As I have already suggested, theory is hardly a homogeneous enterprise. Its diverse strands pose diverse challenges to pedagogy. I want to proceed by reviewing four theoretical discourses and consider their implications for the larger enterprise of teaching.