The irony is that while the intellectual force of so much that was going on was decentering, the result within the profession was that theory actually created the sense of a center around which all of us were orbiting, in one way or another.

Born: 1957.

Education: Harvard University, BA, 1980 (class of 1979); Stanford University, PhD, 1988.

Kenneth W. Warren is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of English in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He has been teaching at Chicago since 1991.

Publications

Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (1993), So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (2003), and What Was African American Literature? (2011). His edited books include Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (2013) and Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought (2009).

Some of his most important articles are “Still on the Lower Frequencies: Invisible Man at 50,” The Common Review: The Magazine of the Great Books Foundation (Fall 2002); “As White as Anybody: Race and the Politics of Counting as Black,” New Literary History (2000); “An Inevitable Drift?: Oligarchy, Du Bois and the Politics of Race Between the Wars,” boundary 2 (2000); “The End(s) of African American Studies,” American Literary History (2000); “Appeals for (Mis)recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora,” Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (1993); “Thinking Beyond Catastrophe: Leon Forrest's There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden,” Callaloo (1993); “The Problem of Anthologies, or Making the Dead Wince,” American Literature (1993); “From Under the Superscript: A Response to Michael Awkward,” American Literary History (1992); and “Frederick Douglass's Life and Times: Progressive Rhetoric and the Problem of Constituency,” Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (1990). Warren is a frequent contributor to https://nonsite.org/author/kwarren. Professor Warren's work has opened widespread debate over the nature and identity of African American literature.

Professor Kenneth Warren was interviewed by Veeser on July 29, 2015, in Chicago.

HAV: Professor Warren, what is your experience of the literary theory era?

KW: I began to get a sense that writing about literature was something other than appreciation and interpretation in the last year of my undergraduate education at Harvard. Reading The Structuralist Controversy in a seminar, Introduction to the History of Theory, I remember moving away from what something meant to the way in which meaning was constructed.