How do you think about theory today?

[Deterritorial]

Hi everyone, I'm an applicant to master's programs in comp lit. I'm interested in how other applicants to English/Comp Lit programs think about theory today. How much theory have you read during your undergraduate? How much pleasure/torture do you find in reading and thinking about theory? What theory do you want to incorporate into your studies during your programs? Do you care about the current status of literary theory and its relationship to continental philosophy (much of the latter, I guess, is not gonna be taught in graduate school, e.g., Žižek, Rancière and Agamben)? Do you agree that the age of theory is already over? Any comment will be appreciated.

[AtlasFox]

So I literally stumbled upon this quote today as I'm doing reading for my master's thesis, but Mari Ruti writes in The Ethics of Opting Out, "The task of theory is to reinvent the world rather than to merely describe its existing—impoverished—forms, there is, for me, a difference between theorizing that provides alternatives to lives as they are currently lived and theorizing that sounds like futile talk about visions that are entirely untenable as real-life options" (151).

To answer some of your questions, I took a critical theory class as an undergrad, and a few of my upper level literature classes incorporated theoretical readings alongside literary ones. I enjoy certain theories over others, my preferences being queer, feminist, and critical race theory, and I think that's because, like Mari Ruti, I like to think about theory in terms of how it can help people socially, how theory can and should have practical value. 

[EM51413]

I used to find literary theory extremely interesting, then I realized that what we call "theory" is a particular way of doing things with ideas that can be potentially problematic. Much of this thinking is shaped by read "post-critique" debates (Latour, Felski, Love, Moi...). I find continental philosophy intensely interesting (though being a fellow Lacanian, I find Zizek sometimes questionable), but only when considered as philosophical ideas and with proper contextualization. Bouncing ideas and literary works off each other as contextualized entities each with their own dignity is more pleasing to me than reading one thing "through" another. I personally find the "here's the theory and here's my reading of this literary work through the theory" kind of scholarship pointless, because they take ideas way too uncritically and refuse literary works the chance to speak for themselves. And is not making literary works speak for themselves--often against philosophy or ideas that we hold to be true or self-eident--an important part of criticism? Nevertheless, I think it's very important to read theory, even outdated ones. Not only is it useful for understanding older scholarship, it also saves one from the embarrassment of reinventing the wheel, which happens all too often, I think, in the humanities.

[merry night wanderer]

I was only formally trained in theory in a single overview class as an undergrad, and have largely had teachers with more standard historicist or formalist approaches, so it's something I look forward to investigating further in the future.I love theory, though I am definitely of the school that thinks that literature is a special kind of thing to analyze rather than a mere reflection of theoretical concepts. As someone with a philosophy background, I also often find that approach relatively ungrounded and unrigorous, and much prefer to start with understanding the text "on its own terms" insofar as we can - which is, ironically, something I learned more explicitly in philosophy, with the Principle of Charity and all. I understand the objections to the idea of "literature on its own terms" and think some of them are quite valid, but it just feels like putting literature through a meat grinder, and at the expense of some of literature's unique insights. 

I don't think the age of theory is over, but I think we are finding that our previous approaches are a dead-end. I find the affective turn in the humanities to be fascinating because while I think aspects of it are quite tenuous, it is genuinely grappling with the problems we've inherited by revisioning perception, embodiment, etc. (even if, as Eugenie Brinkema says, we're often just using it as a substitution for previous essentialisms). Which is not to say postmodernism is untenable - I have a lot of respect for it, and I think it's sort of inevitable that the era proceeding the one after would get exhausted of the previous theoretical approach, and I have no doubt postmodernism will be rediscovered someday, but I also suspect we are in the process of constructing something relatively different. 

Edited December 30, 2019 by merry night wanderer

[onerepublic96]

9 hours ago, EM51413 said:

I used to find literary theory extremely interesting, then I realized that what we call "theory" is a particular way of doing things with ideas that can be potentially problematic. Much of this thinking is shaped by read "post-critique" debates (Latour, Felski, Love, Moi...). I find continental philosophy intensely interesting (though being a fellow Lacanian, I find Zizek sometimes questionable), but only when considered as philosophical ideas and with proper contextualization. Bouncing ideas and literary works off each other as contextualized entities each with their own dignity is more pleasing to me than reading one thing "through" another. I personally find the "here's the theory and here's my reading of this literary work through the theory" kind of scholarship pointless, because they take ideas way too uncritically and refuse literary works the chance to speak for themselves. And is not making literary works speak for themselves--often against philosophy or ideas that we hold to be true or self-eident--an important part of criticism? Nevertheless, I think it's very important to read theory, even outdated ones. Not only is it useful for understanding older scholarship, it also saves one from the embarrassment of reinventing the wheel, which happens all too often, I think, in the humanities.

This! x10