Framing Theory’s Empire

waal, I constructed that whole shadow box and photographed it, but John did stick the words on the top. I suppose ‘designed together is technically accurate here, but I think I’m going to angle for more credit over dinner.

5 and 7 are the most concise critique of the whole field of Theory I’ve ever read. I’m guessing the book dances on these questions with great wit and grace. If it answers them, it will be a unique contribution to the field, and may collapse it. My hat’s off to anyone who tries.

Still, pretty cover.

wow. I was going to write an apologetic retraction of 8, saying that it was sparked by my dislike for Derrida, Spivak, Bhabha and their ilk, but that I hadn’t come across any such nonsense in the writings of the contributors to this book. After John’s clarification at 9, maybe I don’t have to.

6 – so you co-designed the book in the same sense that Stan Lee co-created Spiderman

I remember Theory as a move away from direct textual exegesis to consideration of how texts and exegeses are produced in the first place: interrogation of reading and writing as embedded in and inflected by the cultural, intellectual, institutional etc. settings in which they take place. Once that becomes your topic, literary texts (e.g., Balzac’s Sarrasine) become occasions for self-conscious displays of exegetical virtuosity (e.g., Barthes’s S/Z) or meditations on the not always conscious sources of one’s own typical interpretive moves (e.g., every deconstruction of a literary text was supposed to end with a deconstruction of the deconstruction), and the real action is not in those texts but in theories of and approaches to interpretation (if “interpretation” is the word I’m looking for), at which point your main interest is Continental philosophy or cultural anthropology or Lacanian psychoanalysis, but not Tennyson’s prosody or Woolf’s imagery or the philology of the East Midlands dialect of Middle English. It was kind of a return of the repressed after the “New Criticism,” which ruled out any consideration of the context of literary production as one or another fallacy, had attained total scholastic aridity .

It made for some brilliant intellectual work, a lot of jargon-based posing, bitterly fought institutional politics, and excellent departmental cocktail parties. My contribution was mainly to the posing and the cocktail parties.

Hope this helps the beginners. The book sounds like difficult fun.

16 –

Speaking as a lay person wedded to a disillusioned ex-practitioner of capital-T Theory, I’d define it thusly:

“Theory” is a broad term for all the myriad ways of reading literature that involve ignoring the narrative completely and focusing on the political, sociological, philosophical, psychosexual, metaphysical, anthropological, and possibly gastronomical implications of the book. Also, you are required to call it a “text” instead of a “book.”

Hope that helps.

Ah, I see. As a book partisan, I must have been going to cocktail parties on enemy turf.

23 – never mind theories on literature, there is a whole theory of ‘who the artist is’ just in that one comment.

Thanks to Ajl and Hogan for the explanations.

28: I’ve often pondered that myself, greatzamfir.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a course was taught with the same name in some media studies department somewhere.

Actually it would be interesting to read a book on political philosophy that focussed on analogies between effective government and good system design in the engineering sense. One of the advantages of democracy strikes me as being the feedback loop.