This book offers a series of interviews with important literary and cultural critics about the rise of “Theory” and its continuing uses now. Theory, arriving from Europe in the late 1960s, was met by overwhelming excitement, and then consumed and transformed by receptive American professors, who by the 1980s eagerly overthrew the Anglo-American approaches to literature that had long dominated the US academy. That overthrow replaced concepts like “close readings,” “aesthetics,” “unity,” “beauty,” and “irony” with subversive notions of “deconstruction,” “essentialism,” “decentering,” “master discourse,” “binary opposition,” “antifoundationalism,” “undecidability,” “power,” and “subtext.” Theory's conquest of American higher education changed everything, from elite graduate programs in English literature to the readings and methods in thousands of composition classes forced upon firstyear students in colleges around the country.

For the practitioners in this volume, first encounters with theory were both disorienting and liberating. Stanley Fish, stumbling upon Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida fortuitously by renting an apartment in Paris, experienced it as “a heady combination of intellectual excitement and adventure which could not help but have an erotic component to it.” Vincent Leitch early on felt the impact of theory “first as a crisis entailing a loss of faith and then as a conversion.” Jane Gallop “completely fell in love” with theory's “edginess […] lack of piety […] difficulty.” The “magic words” of Jacque Derrida's “Structure, Sign, and Play” convinced W. J. T. Mitchell that “the rules of this game were being rewritten. […] It was really a moment of joy […] but also anxiety.” As a second-year grad student, Jeffrey Nealon took a seminar with Derrida: “It was just, boom, boom, boom; this is how it works. It was incredible.” The first time Steven Mailloux heard Gayatri Spivak talk about deconstruction, he felt “the excitement in the room, the feeling that you were participating in some kind of revolution in thought.”

While interviews with critics and theorists have become an established genre, published interviews are almost always one-offs, whereas all of the scholars interviewed here knew that they were participants in a group endeavor. They answer the same questions about theory's rise and its most interesting events, its relevance now, and their personal encounters with theory.