Ask a group of theorists if theory is alive or dead, and you may get a lesson in what Michel Foucault called “the speaker's benefit”—the tendency to assume the best for and of oneself. Foucault was thinking of the tendency of late twentieth-century readers to assume that they were more liberated and less repressed than their Victorian counterparts. It is clear that a similar temptation exists in retrospectively narrating the theory era, that moment beginning in the late ‘60s when the university was a place of promise, progressive social change was afoot, and the generation most closely associated with the rise of theory was young. It is a heady mix, ripe for self-aggrandizement.

There is little in the way of grandiosity here, though, nor idealizing nostalgia. There is a distinct glow when critics talk about the way that theory was a force for intellectual and personal transformation. However, it would take a lot of persuading for most people to see this as a revolution, and not simply because its effects were mostly confined to the academy. There is also significant hesitation on the part of some of these critics, closely identified with the rise of theory, to say what it is. There is the danger that by describing it, one lessens its impact, draining it of its potential to affect the present. It seems late in the game for such scruples, and by touting the elusive capaciousness of theory, one simply condemns it to obscurity. Even if one keeps faith in the liveness of theory, a historical approach seems more in keeping with its path through academic institutions, and its ambiguous place—at once a rallying cry, and a footnote—in a university under siege.

In this view, one may also agree with Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein-Graff in their claim that theory was never successfully translated into a mass education project. Instead, it kept its sights turned on a niche audience, a subset even of humanities scholars. But what that audience may have lacked in numbers it made up for in intensity. Far-flung as it was, there was a movement, a fact attested to by the scholars gathered here.