Aaron's Reviews > Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction

This book was my first in the "Very Short Introduction" series, and I picked one in a field where I had a little bit of background. Where I went to college it was impossible to take a humanities class and not have someone mention Foucault or Althusser. The school newspaper once ran an article "The Next Person Who Says 'Derrida' Gets Dropkicked". Reading this book, I couldn't help but wish I had it back then, for while every professor loved to spout critical theory, the acting assumption was that everyone in the class knew what they were talking about, and as a freshman from the Midwest, I most certainly did not. While I eventually toiled to form a solid framework about these ideas, it was never quite as elegantly structured and argot-free as what Culler puts down here.

The book clearly has its limits -- as it claims: it is merely an introduction causing it to give only a cursory overview of even the biggest name's in the field. Also, it's ten years old, and I'm sure that causes it to miss some of the major things happening in academia at the moment.

Lastly, while a minor point, my blood boiled and cartoon-esque steam shot from my ears when I read "A good deal of the hostility to [literary:] 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." Certainly this feeling of always being behind on the latest paper in your field is a condition of academia in general. I can think of a panoply of alternate reasons why there is hostility to literary theory: writing that prefers to obfuscate rather than clarify (Jameson), a total lack of rigor (the Sokal hoax), and a frustrating combination of advancing an epistemology that undercuts any claims that they are working towards something "real" while simultaneously positioning their work on the highest of moral ground (Marcuse). I'd appreciate it if Culler didn't make it seem like the reason I never stuck with critical theory was simply laziness on my part.

Rant aside, if you ever find yourself in intellectual settings where Foucault is getting name checked and you don't know what they are saying, get this book.