THE THEORY MONSTER HAS ESCAPED
Its appearances mutate, it is amorphous yet threatening, its names are many. It sprouts a sinister Marxist head here, a sly post-modern smirk there, all the time waving an indignant Feminist finger at us and at itself. No sooner has it begun speaking the austere language of ‘structures’ and than it's rejoicing in pre-rational intensities and bodily fluid. It is fatally attracted to systems and totalities yet does nothing more than cobble together half-assimilated ideas from miscellaneous sources. Here it’s over-subjective, conflating meaning with reader-response; here it’s reducing a text to a mere illustration of objective forces. Over lunch it celebrates the text’s endless indeterminacy, by dinner it’s imposing on it an alien, fixed meaning. When and where it was born remain uncertain, but it is certainly a mutant offspring, buggered into existence by the indiscriminate coupling of incompatible ideas. Schools breed and multiply within it, and yet it remains One. Its poker-faced PC solemnity is forbidding, yet it is also a frivolous homo ludens, taking nothing seriously, forever playing and punning and putting the world in brackets. The rhetoric of hegemony and power pours from its mouth, but jouissance leaks from its arse. It is irrational, even as – and just because - it introduces into Literature the cold acids of conceptual thought and interpretation; it hates literature and is blind to literariness even as it adopts a grotesque parody of literary style. It speaks in dry and boring jargon, yet lewdly seduces the young with an inexplicable sex-appeal. It is costive and hermetic and yet obsessed with changing the world. It is merely fashionable (and has been now for some thirty-odd years), yet stubborn or obtuse enough to survive its several publicised and prophesied deaths.
The Theory monster must be caught and grappled with. Reward: A prestigious academic career.
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