Literary Analysis and the Theory of Literature

One of my favorite stories about the days of literary High Theory is told by the feminist critic Sandra Gilbert. In the late '80s, Gilbert was interviewing a candidate for a job in Princeton University's English department. "What would your dream course be?" she asked. "My dream course," the candidate responded, "would be theory and nontheory." "What's nontheory?" asked a committee member. "You know," the candidate replied. "Poems, stories, plays."...Elaine Showwalter, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

A very short introduction: "When Aretha Franklin sings 'You make me feel like a natural woman,' she seems happy to be confirmed in a 'natural' sexuality identity, prior to culture, by a man's treatment of her. But her formulation, 'you make me feel like a natural woman,' suggests that the supposedly natural or given identity is a cultural role, an effect that has been produced within culture; she isn't a 'natural woman' but has to be made to feel like one. The natural woman is a cultural product...the main thrust of recent theory has been the critique of whatever is taken as natural, the demonstration that what has been thought or declared natural is in fact a historical, cultural product..."(1)—so says theorist Jonathan Culler.

Depending upon which school of theory, meaning could stem from the author, the text, the reader, or two or three of these loci combined—couched as immanent, historical, or utterly objective. But wherever theory stakes its next center, it will still be some prescribed model for how to think about concepts that come to us "naturally." Do I really need theory to 'get' Franklin's lyrics as they jangle my mind, vibrate my bones, and move me "body and soul"? If I do (if you say so), then let it be some auspicious convergence of evolutionary theory with the use of language, the calling card of my species. I hold a gestalt sense that what I write or read reflects what I am as a member of a population, and also extends who I am as one of its individuals; that pair of notions feels correct for a number of reasons.

Happily, we can make a case for Darwin displacing Lacan and Foucault. Suc-cessful literature, by virtue of inherent, transmittable 'truths,' seems to spawn new works in the same sense that adaptation and exaptation lead to fit variations and new, improved species. I imagine nouveau-shaped nooks opening around an organic, Gaudi-esque library, ready to accommodate the next iteration of new books with new thoughts—and so on to the next and the next generation.