Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization

forget the blackbirds for now. the question is: how many ways are there of questioning theory in our age? and if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the earth wobbles under the weight of six billion beholders, what is beauty then? or is beauty unmentionable in academe, despite the indiscretions of some scholars—elaine Scary, fred turner, Charles Jencks, among others—who have recently taken the name of beauty in vain? again, forget beauty and the blackbirds; think of geography. thomas friedman went home one day and said to his wife, “Honey, I think the world is flat.” He was echoing a technocrat in bangalore who said to him, “tom, the playing field is being leveled.” Leveled or flattened, they both meant the world is very round: interactive, interdependent, instantaneous, contemporaneous—and viciously fractious withal. the taliban vandalize priceless buddhist statues; thieves armed with computers loot aztec and assyrian treasures; fatwa establish new guidelines for literary criticism; and the great museums of the world wrangle with governments, with history itself, about the patrimonies of art. this is a nasty condition, both flat and round. What kind of literary theory, what kind of aesthetics generally, can emerge from a world that defies euclidean and non-euclidean geometries with every diurnal spin? the answer to these real and mock queries seems lost in partisanship