In this talk, I will examine key bases or sites—journals, presses, institutes, and so forth—that produced and disseminated “American Theory,” which I define as a cultural-political movement united by an intellectual attention to difference, discontinuity, marginality, and otherness that began in United States higher education and then took on international dimensions. While focusing on the years 1965 to 1975, I will also show how these bases’ deployments of American Theory contributed to the post-Sixties overshadowing among academics of the social theory and critical philosophy connected to the Frankfurt School. This eclipse in the United States was achieved via a “textualization”—part of the so-called linguistic turn—of humanistic knowledge that aided a growing division of the American humanist professoriate from the public sphere.

The School of Criticism and Theory (SCT) was founded in 1976 at the University of California-Irvine. Like theory journals and theory book series, the SCT was designed as a place for disinterested considerations of theory. ‘In the last decade or so,’ an early and introductory SCT pamphlet read, ‘the recent variety of theory has not been situated, investigated, and assessed. Nor have the competitive relations among all the theoretical approaches been clearly enunciated since a continuing forum for dialogue does not exist. The School was created to provide such a forum.’ In this image from the mid- to late 1970s, we can see a gathering of SCT scholars following a presentation, likely a keynote. Such events were possible in part due to the theoretical work done and networks established in the United States during the previous decade.