Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

silence we have so often deplored […]. But when we stifle
creative impulse and make students opt for survival over
honesty, we have done the same thing” (189). Hairston’s
conclusion, to put things simply, is that “Authoritarian methods
are still authoritarian methods, no matter what cause they’re
invoked” (187). Similar fears of those same scenarios are
expressed by Kurt Spellmeyer, whose critiques of “theory” I also
referenced earlier. For Spellmeyer, that “intellectual
intimidation” and those “authoritarian methods” of Hairston’s
breed what he refers to, in “After Theory,” as “an
unacknowledged violence,” which “precisely because so many
people working in English studies have encountered theory only
as liberating, that hidden legacy has passed unnoticed – and
unredressed” (894). At the heart of Spellmeyer’s essay would
seem to be the disparity between the promise of “theory” and the
reality of “theory” – the difference between its theory and
practice, as it were. Of the former, it would seem that it was
something for which he had great hope and from which he took
great inspiration, as my discussion of his “sense of purpose and
‘empowerment’” because of it attests. Of the latter, however,
it would seem that his witnessing of it, its
“operationalization,” served to dissipate that hope and that
inspiration both. He writes:
Theory and its successors have taken shape in the
space opened up by the conflict between our hunger
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