Well, this is an interesting and fascinating description of what Theory is all about, from the point of view of the renowned Structuralist, Theorist, Linguist, Intertextualist - Professor Jonathan Culler of the Department of English, Cornell University.
Over to Culler...
Theory in
literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or methods for
its study. It’s a body of thinking and writing whose limits are exceedingly
hard to define. The philosopher Richard Rorty speaks of a new, mixed genre that
began in the nineteenth century: ‘Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay and
Carlyle and Emerson, a new kind of writing has developed which is neither the
evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual
history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophecy, but all of these mingled
together in a new genre.’ The most convenient designation of this miscellaneous
genre is simply the nickname theory, which
has come to designate works that succeed in challenging and reorienting
thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong.
This simple
explanation is an unsatisfactory definition but it does seem to capture what
has happened since the 1960s: writings from outside the field of literary
studies have been taken up by people in literary studies because their analyses
of language, or mind, or history, or culture, offer new and persuasive accounts
of textual and cultural matters.
Theory in
this sense is not a set of methods for literary study but an unbounded group of
writings about everything under the sun, from the most technical problems of
academic philosophy to the changing ways in which people have talked about and
thought about the body.
The genre of
‘theory’ includes works of anthropology, art history, film studies, gender
studies, linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, science
studies, social and intellectual history, and sociology. The works in question
are tied to arguments in these fields, but they become ‘theory’ because their
visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people who are not
studying those disciplines.
Works that
become ‘theory’ offer accounts others can use about meaning, nature and
culture, the functioning of the psyche, the relations of public to private
experience and of larger historical forces to individual experience.
The main
effect of theory is the disputing of ‘common sense’: commonsense views about
meaning, writing, literature, experience. For example, theory questions
Ø the conception that the meaning of an utterance
or text is what the speaker ‘had in mind’,
Ø or the idea that writing is an expression whose
truth lies elsewhere, in an experience or a state of affairs which it
expresses,
Ø or the notion that reality is what is ‘present’
at a given moment.
Theory is
often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions, and further, an attempt to
show that what we take for granted as ‘common sense’ is in fact a historical
construction, a particular theory that has come to seem so natural to us that
we don’t even see it as a theory.
As a critique
of common sense and exploration of alternative conceptions, theory involves a
questioning of the most basic premisses or assumptions of literary study, the
unsettling of anything that might have been taken for granted: What is meaning?
What is an author?
What is it
to read? What is the ‘I’ or subject who writes, reads, or acts? How do texts
relate to the circumstances in which they are produced?
Theory involves speculative practice:
accounts of desire, language, and so on, that challenge received ideas (that
there is something natural, called ‘sex’; that signs represent prior
realities). So doing, they incite you to rethink the categories with which you
may be reflecting on literature. These examples display the main thrust of
recent theory, which has been the critique of whatever is taken as natural, the
demonstration that what has been thought or declared natural is in fact a
historical, cultural product. What happens can be grasped through a different
example: when Aretha Franklin sings ‘You make me feel like a natural woman’, she
seems happy to be confirmed in a ‘natural’ sexual identity, prior to culture,
by a man’s treatment of her. But her formulation, ‘you make me feel like a
natural woman’, suggests that the supposedly natural or given identity is a
cultural role, an effect that has been produced within culture: she isn’t a
‘natural woman’ but has to be made to feel like one. The natural woman is a
cultural product.
So what is theory?
Four main points have emerged.
1. Theory is interdisciplinary – discourse
with effects outside an original discipline.
2. Theory is analytical and speculative –
an attempt to work out what is involved in what we call sex or language or
writing or meaning or the subject.
3. Theory is a critique of common sense, of
concepts taken as natural.
4. Theory is reflexive, thinking about thinking,
enquiry into the categories we use in making sense of things, in literature and
in other discursive practices.
It is an unbounded corpus of writings which
is always being augmented as the young and the restless, in critiques of the guiding
conceptions of their elders, promote the contributions to theory of new
thinkers and rediscover the work of older, neglected ones. Theory is thus a
source of intimidation, a resource for constant upstagings: ‘What? you haven’t
read Lacan! How can you talk about the lyric without addressing the specular
constitution of the speaking subject?’
The unmasterability of theory is a major
cause of resistance to it. No matter how well versed you may think yourself,
you can never be sure whether you ‘have to read’ Jean Baudrillard, Mikhail
Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Hélène Cixous, C. L. R. James, Melanie Klein, or
Julia Kristeva, or whether you can ‘safely’ forget them. (It will, of course,
depend on who ‘you’ are and who you want to be.) A good deal of the hostility
to theory no doubt comes from the fact that to admit the importance of theory
is to make an open-ended commitment, to leave yourself in a position where
there are always important things you don’t know. But
this is the condition of life itself.
Theory makes you desire mastery: you hope
that theoretical reading will give you the concepts to organize and understand
the phenomena that concern you. But theory makes mastery impossible, not only because
there is always more to know, but, more specifically and more painfully,
because theory is itself the questioning of presumed results and the
assumptions on which they are based. The nature of theory is to undo, through a
contesting of premisses and postulates, what you thought you knew, so the
effects of theory are not predictable. You have not become master, but neither
are you where you were before.
You reflect on your reading in new ways.
You have different questions to ask and a better sense of the implications of
the questions you put to works you read.
This very short introduction will not make
you a master of theory, and not just because it is very short, but it outlines
significant lines of thought and areas of debate, especially those pertaining
to literature. It presents examples of theoretical investigation in the hope
that readers will find theory valuable and engaging and take occasion to sample
the pleasures of thought.
Excerpted from OUP’s ‘A Very Short
Introduction’ Series, Jonathan Culler:
Literary Theory.
Cartoon Strip: OUP
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