ABSTRACT
Professor Terence Hawkes (who is well informed in these matters) has recently stated that’ “Critical theory” has become something that academics need to know about in order to get jobs and move about in the world’ (Hawkes 1991:3). If academics need to know about theory, so do their students. The ‘theory market’ in academic publishing aims to meet the needs of both groups through the provision of ‘readers’, ‘reader’s guides’ and the like, recycling the material that initially appears in the form of monographs, journal articles and collections of essays, and translations mainly from the French. So significant has the textbook market in theory become that virtually any book on literary criticism with the words ‘theory’ and ‘introduction’ in its title is now considered to be eminently saleable. Most readers and students of theory make use of these books, and many encounter theoretical writing only through the medium of anthologies and surveys. It is customary to regard these utilitarian textbooks as wholly marginal to the enterprise of literary theory. But-to invoke one of the clichés or favourite tropes of the genre with which I am concerned in this essay-such assumptions are questionable and need to be challenged. The authors of guides to literary theory tend to make very modest claims for their own work, yet the same authors frequently question the privileging of authorial statements. Many of the theory guides also denigrate the notion of a literary canon-the canon is frequently portrayed as a merely ideological construction-and this should lead us in turn to question the canon of theory. Whose interests does it serve, we may ask, to maintain the all-pervading conventional distinction between the high theoretician and the lowly introducer of theory?
