John Frow

Coming in at 3,140 pages spread over four chunky volumes and featuring essays by 181 contributors, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory is in every sense a weighty articulation of the state of literary criticism in the early twenty-first century. In their famous Encyclopédie (1751–66), Diderot and d’Alembert promulgated the virtues of consolidating new know-ledge in the public domain, rather than leaving the intellectuals who were responsible for the development of such expertise isolated in their academic cloisters. Looking back self-consciously to this distinguished predecessor, John Frow, in his Introduction, acknowledges a tension between the encyclopedist’s instinct to reproduce conventional categories, instead of risking the introduction of new research that might upset conceptual applecarts, and the desire of ambitious editors to frame these topics in a progressive rather than ossified manner. Hence Frow cites his instructions to contributors as inviting authors ‘to make their own arguments about the topic rather than (just) describing existing treatments of it’, adding: ‘In this way many of our articles may diverge from what readers would expect to see out of a traditional encyclopedia entry.’

In the winter of 1968–69 the buildings of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt – the symbolically resonant home of what had come to be known as the Frankfurt School – were occupied by students. The police were called in, and Theodor W. Adorno, one of the great radical theorists of the twentieth century, pressed charges against a young man whose doctoral work he was supervising. Two months later, a group of women forced their way into Adorno’s lecture, handed out leaflets proclaiming that ‘Adorno as an institution is dead’, and ‘surrounded him, strewing flowers, performing a dumb show and … baring their breasts’. In action after action, the contempt of the students for the radical theorists of an older generation was made clear.