Erecting the Institutional Edifice of Theory: The Mediums of <i>Diacritics</i> and <i>Critical Inquiry</i> , 1970–1990

This article focuses on the print culture of “theory” in Diacritics and Critical Inquiry. Each medium represented a variety of “theory journal,” and each medium’s organization, development, and production bore heavily on their intellectual projects. In addition, Diacritics and Critical Inquiry, from the 1970s to about 1990, were mediums that not only “carried out the aims of advanced research” but where scholars breached the “postwar settlement” of the 1950s and 1960s, when literary and social criticism withdrew from explicit politics. For, while scholars from across the humanities contributed to Diacritics and Critical Inquiry, many were literary scholars who used theory not simply to “professionalize the critical move” but also to make political claims that had an interdisciplinary reach. Still, Diacritics and Critical Inquiry formalized postatomistic views in ways that assumed an explicitly political cast only in fits and starts. And because theory was in part rooted in philosophical traditions from nineteenth- and twentieth-century mainland Europe, the mediums of theory that this article examines contributed to the invention of “Continental philosophy” in the Anglo-American world.