You can seem to master a subject that appeals to you. You have to be good at it. That is what I suspect drew some people to literary theory, because we don't have to work so hard.

Born: 1931; Died: 2019.

Education: Johns Hopkins University, BA, 1953; PhD, Comparative Literature, 1959.

Macksey received a doctorate in comparative literature from Hopkins in 1957 and joined the faculty a year later. He had joint appointments in Johns Hopkins's School of Arts and Sciences and the medical school, where he helped design a curriculum that included writing and the humanities. As director for the Humanities Center, Macksey, joined by French literary theorist and philosopher of social sciences René Girard, then associate professor of French at Hopkins, and deconstructionist and literary critic Eugenio Donato (both of whom co-founded the Humanities Center with Macksey), and with funding from the Ford Foundation, organized the influential international literary theory symposium “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” which featured prominent academics, such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, and where Derrida presented his lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” credited with “tear[ing] down the temple of structuralism.” These lectures were collected as The Structuralist Controversy, the most recent version of which was published in 2005.

Publications

The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (1970), Velocities of Change: Critical Essays from Modern Language Notes (1974), and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, ed. (2005). He was book review editor for MLN.

Veeser conducted this interview at Macksey's home in Baltimore on August 7 and 8, 2015.

HAV: What were the big events in the history of theory, the turning points, the confrontations, the defining moments?

RM: Eugenio [Donato] and I kept revising our introductions because the book was changing and we could see in the moment itself there was a kind of Hegelian—I won't call it a haze, which sounds pejorative, but there was a penumbra of Hegel in much, and of course Jean Hyppolite was at the center of the French Hegel, the revival.