IN 1979, the California poet Robert Hass published his now-famous poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Hass’s poem criticized poststructuralist literary theory (which he called “the new thinking”) for disregarding particulars in favor of “the luminous clarity of a general idea,” and for adopting a pathologically mournful philosophy of language in which “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” As a consequence of this sort of thinking, Hass wrote, “everything dissolves: justice, / pine, hair, woman, you and I.” This eloquent lament did not stop the rise of literary theory (neither did Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s blistering essay “Against Theory,” published a few years later). And, although much has changed in the intervening years — theory is no longer all “about loss,” in Hass’s words — the place of theory in the academy seems secure. Fewer people may “do” theory now, but it survives as a kind of conventional wisdom, a default approach to how literary scholars treat language and read texts.
Nevertheless, if theory was as problematic as Hass’s poem intimated 40 years ago, shouldn’t we be more suspicious of the conventional wisdom that is its legacy? According to Toril Moi, the answer is yes. Her important new book, Revolution of the Ordinary, makes a case for rejecting the approach to language that the “theory project” produced. Like the speaker of Hass’s poem, Moi believes that the way literary theories think about language has corrosive ethical and political consequences. Unlike Hass, she does not counter theory with poetry. Nor does she offer a substitute theory to correct the problems of the old. Instead, she looks to philosophy, particularly to “ordinary language philosophy” — by which she means the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, to a lesser extent, J. L. Austin, as interpreted by Stanley Cavell. For Moi, this philosophical constellation promises to renovate literary studies by reconnecting our language to the world from which theory severed it.