Jonathan Culler's opening to Literary Thory: A Very Short Introduction is geared toward defining theory for someone who is not within the discipline of English or even within academia. Specifically, he introduces the topic of theory in literary studies, not the theory of literature; in other words, a practice applied to texts rather than an account of them. Addressing the issue of the influence of theory is distinct from that of literary theory, or "the systematic account of the nature of literature and the methods for analyzing it" (1).
This basically covers the first three paragraphs (subtitled "What is theory"), so I would go ahead and move on to the rest of Chapter 1, but something struck me in this opening (which I don't recall finding strange when I read Culler's text last summer to study for the Comps). From the initial paragraph, the stance he takes in relation to his reader is familiar and even sympathetic: "You can be involved with theory; you can teach or study theory; you can hate theory or be afraid of it" (1). As part of this move of solidarity, Culler creates and distances himself from an oppositional entity, the "people who say this [what theory is]," that contributes to the general confusion around the issue. What I find unsettling is how he uses this distance to make judgment calls but at the same time avoid a certain amount of accountability by attributing it to "what they have in mind" (1; emphasis mine). The contruction of ideas in the third paragraph (and it is possible I am reading too much into this) implies a line of thinking as follows: there is antagonism towards theory because "non-literary matters" that have a "scarcely evident" relation to literature are bringing "foreign names" to bear upon our understanding of texts. I myself am somewhat aloof about theory (I most often employ a cultural studies lens) but it is not because of the nationality or race of its practitioners as Culler states: "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" (1-2). Again, however, it is certainly possible that I am being overly touchy about this.
Moving on to the next section, Culler addresses "The term theory" as a form of complex speculation. He differentiates a theory from a guess, which "would suggest that there is a right answer, which I don't happen to know" (2). By contrast, a theory is "an explanation whose truth or falsity might be hard to demonstrate" (2). The latter quote had me somewhat confused at first because it still seems to suggest that there is a rightness or "truth" to be located, but I suppose that any time you acknowledge and respond to what another 'theory' or explanation says about the meaning of a literary work, you are taking up something like the issue of the truth or falseness of that analysis. Using the basic idea of theorizing why two people split up, Culler specifies that "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'" (2). I was suprised that despite using this somewhat shocking explanation of incestuous attraction, Culler does not make use of how Freudian this is to exemplify the application of a theory, psychoanalysis, to understand the underlying meaning of a plot component (or what would be the matter of a text). Isn't this exactly what Culler is trying to get at (explaining what theory means as a practice in literary studies)? But maybe I am confusing theory in literary studies with methods for the study of literature, a distinction Culler insists upon in his definition.
Culler emphasizes interdisciplinarity as a major part of understanding "Theory as a genre" (his subtitle for the next section) of "works that succeed in in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong" (3). The works that he includes within this genre come from the fields of "anthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social and intellectual history, and sociology" (3-4). He identifies the main effect of theory as "the disputing of. . . common-sense views about meaning, writing, literature, experience" (4). To this list, I would add views about categorization, as theory in literary studies turns back and pushes at our assumptions about history, politics, philosophy, gender, identity, etc.
The last thing I want to point out from Chapter 1 comes from Culler's overview of two well-known examples of theory, "Foucault on sex" and "Derrida on writing." He uses the section on Foucault to point out one of the most fundamental ideas we now accept as part of literary studies: understanding that a text (as a part of a larger discourse) constructs rather than just reflects the notions Culler terms as "common-sense" thinking. He notes that "Foucault calls this kind of enquiry a 'genealogical' critique: an exposure of how supposedly basic categories, such as 'sex', are produced by discursive practices" (8). In Culler's explanation of theory as a pushing back at the naturalization of notions like 'sex', I wonder whether this notion of theory hasn't in part essentialized literary studies. Is it not a kind of naturalization to say that this is what literature does: it constructs? (In part, I say this because of how I had thought, as a matter of course, that disputing views about categorization belongs in Culler's list of theory's effects.)
Again, sorry for the lateness of my post.
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