Theory Madness!

In the spirit of March Madness I decided to fill out a bracket for my diagram. The competition: who would most likely get hired to fill the new Lit Theory position for the Whitworth English department? Or, if you prefer, who would be Whitworth's "Theorist in Residence?" Either way I obviously tried to base the competition off theory alone and not on some of the qualifications of being a professor at Whitworth, such as being a Christian, since that would rule out all but about three of the theorists.

I apologize for any confusion or difficulty reading the bracket. For the sake of conserving space Wimsatt/Beardsley became Wimsley, though I could have gone with Beardsatt. Horkheimer/Adorno became Adornheimer.

To make the bracket I went to a website online where you just put all the information in and it randomly generates a bracket. I felt like the randomness would be easier than trying to figure out who has had more "influence," which while easy for the top and bottom seeds would've been difficult for the middle seeds. The randomness led to a funny quirk in the bracket, where de Pizan is the 1 seed and Plato is the 22 seed, about the opposite that would've happened if I'd tried doing only influence.

In deciding who would win a matchup I inconsistently applied who's theory I thought was "better" or "more sophisticated." I also generally tried to take into account whether or not they focused on literature, philosophy, or society. For example, Wollstonecraft lost to de Pizan because de Pizan seemed to focus more on literature than Wollstonecraft. Similarly Hume beat Nietzsche because in our readings Nietzsche was more of a philosopher than a literary critic, even if those roles might be reversed in their larger bodies of work. Kant lost to de Pizan because he's just the most boring person in history and de Pizan is amazing.

Horkheimer and Adorno ended up beating de Pizan because I thought it was too hard to beat the culture industry.

But there it is. If you think I got a matchup totally wrong let me know!