In literary and cultural studies these days there is a lot of talk about theory - not theory of literature,

mind you; just plain 'theory'. To anyone outside the field, this usage must seem very odd. 'Theory of
what?' you want to ask. It's surprisingly hard to say. It is not the theory of anything in particular, nor a
comprehensive theory of things in general. Sometimes theory seems less an account of anything than
an activity - something you do or don't do. You can be involved with theory; you can teach or study
theory; you can hate theory or be afraid of it. None of this, though, helps much to understand what
theory is.

'Theory', we are told, has radically changed the nature of literary studies, but people who say this do
not mean literary theory, the systematic account of the nature of literature and of the methods for
analysing it. When people complain that there is too much theory in literary studies these days, they
don't mean too much systematic reflection on the nature of literature or debate about the distinctive
qualities of literary language, for example. Far from it, they have something else in view.

What they have in mind may be precisely that there is too much discussion of non-literary matters,
too much debate about general questions whose relation to literature is scarcely evident, too much
reading of difficult psychoanalytical, political, and philosophical texts. Theory is a bunch of (mostly
foreign) names; it means Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler,
Louis Althusser, Gayatri Spivak, for instance.

The term theory

So what is theory? Part of the problem lies in the term theory itself, which gestures in two directions.
On the one hand, we speak of 'the theory of relativity', for example, an established set of
propositions. On the other hand, there is the most ordinary use of the word theory.

'Why did Laura and Michael split up?'

'Well, my theory is that. . .'

What does theory mean here? First, theory signals 'speculation'. But a theory is not the same as a
guess. 'My guess is that. . .'would suggest that there is a right answer, which I don't happen to know:
'My guess is that Laura just got tired of Michael's carping, but we'll find out for sure when their friend
Mary gets hers.' A theory, by contrast, is speculation that might not be affected by what Mary says, an
explanation whose truth or falsity might be hard to demonstrate.

'My theory is that . . .' also claims to offer an explanation that is not obvious. We don't expect the
speaker to continue, 'My theory is that it's because Michael was having an affair with Samantha.' That
wouldn't count as a theory. It hardly requires theoretical acumen to conclude that if Michael and
Samantha were having an affair, that might have had some bearing on Laura's attitude toward
Michael. Interestingly, if the speaker were to say, 'My theory is that Michael was having an affair with
Samantha,' suddenly the existence of this affair becomes a matter of conjecture, no longer certain,
and thus a possible theory. But generally, to count as a theory, not only must an explanation not be
obvious; it should involve a certain complexity: 'My theory is that Laura was always secretly in love
with her father and that Michael could never succeed in becoming the right person.' A theory must be
more than a hypothesis: it can't be obvious; it involves complex relations of a systematic kind among a
number of factors; and it isn’t easily confirmed or disproved. If we bear these factors in mind, it
becomes easier to understand what goes by the name of 'theory'.

Theory as genre
Theory in literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or methods for its study (though
such matters are part of theory and will be treated here, primarily in Chapters 2, 5, and 6). 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 is the simplest explanation of what makes something count as theory. Works
regarded as theory have effects beyond their original field.

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 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. […section excised…]

Theory's effects
If theory is defined by its practical effects, as what changes people's views, makes them think
differently about their objects of study and their activities of studying them, what sort of effects are
these?

The main effects of theory is the disputing of 'common sense': common-sense views about meaning,
writing, literature, experience. For example, theory questions

the conception that the meaning of an utterance or text is what the speaker 'had in mind'.
or the idea that writing is an expression whose truth lies elsewhere, in an experience or a state
of affairs which it expresses,
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?

Both examples of theory illustrate that theory involves speculative practice: accounts of desire,
language, and so on, that challenged 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.

Theory makes other arguments analogous to this one, whether maintaining that apparently natural
social arrangements and institutions, and also the habits of thought of a society, are the product of
underlying economic relations and ongoing power struggles, or that the phenomena of conscious life
may be produced by unconscious forces, or that what we call the self or subject is produced in and
through the systems of language and culture, or that what we call 'presence', 'origin', or the 'original'
is created by copies, an effect of repetition.

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.
 As a result, theory is intimidating. One of the
most dismaying features of theory today is that
it is endless. It is not something that you could
ever master, not a particular group of texts you
could learn so as to 'know theory'. 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?' Or 'how can you write about the
Victorian novel without using Foucault's account of the deployment of sexuality and the hysterization
of women's bodies and Gayatri Spivak's demonstration of the role of colonialism in the construction of
the metropolitan subject?' At times, theory presents itself as a diabolical sentence condemning you to
hard reading in unfamiliar fields, where even the completion of one task will bring not respite but
further difficult assignments, ('Spivak? Yes, but have you read Benita Parry's critique of Spivak and her
response?')

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, Helene 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.