ABSTRACT
Theory is sometimes unpopular with students precisely because its relationship to its home discipline can seem tangential (‘What has this got to do with English? I came here to read literature!’). It has also been regarded with suspicion by more traditional scholars because, as Jonathan Culler points out, it refuses to be judged by the conventional models of disciplinary expertise and authority. When being ‘theoretical’, for example, we might read Sigmund Freud without being aware of the latest research within psychoanalysis or psychiatry, Karl Marx without being a political economist, or Jacques Derrida without being a trained philosopher (Culler 1983: 9). Theory is concerned with big questions about the nature of reality, language, power, gender, sexuality, the body and the self, and it offers a framework within which students and scholars can debate about these broad-ranging issues without getting too extensively mired in detailed arguments within disciplines.
