The trouble with contemporary theory can be summed up by a single symptomatic fact: theory has become the property of English Departments. This is not a slur on the competence of my colleagues who study Anglophone texts. They deploy abstract concepts as well or better than most comparatists. Nonetheless, the fact is that most of today's theory derives, in origin if not in its latest incarnations, from continental thinkers who write in languages and from cultural perspectives that are quite literally foreign to their American expositors. Thus, as we shall see below, the works of theorists such as Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and Kristeva, are often only truly understandable in terms of the complex dialogue that exists between these writers. That dialogue, moreover, forms part of the larger cultural context in which these thinkers are situated, a context that assumes detailed knowledge of a tradition of literary and philosophical understanding unavailable to most monolingual scholars.

Unfortunately, theory in most American universities is taught as critical methodology. It is taught as “theory”: that is, as a body of abstract concepts that students can use to produce “readings” of texts. The result is a series of ahistorical abstractions that are directly “applied” to texts to which they have no articulated discursive or dialogic relation. We receive a Bakhtinian reading of Thackeray, a Jaussian response to Keats, a Derridean—followed by a de Manian—deconstruction of Sidney, and an Irigarayan interpretation of Sterne. In this fashion, concrete historical interventions into specific critical and philosophical debates become metaphysical truths. The result is a perversion of these theorists’ intentions since postmodern theory in general and poststructuralist theory in particular aims to critique precisely the kind of transhistorical metanarratives into which their works have been transformed (Lyotard 1984). The deconstruction of the closure of western metaphysics thus becomes the absolutization of différance as a textual property (Derrida 1980: 536). The critique of patriarchy's specular subject comes to function as an abstract universal fully as phallic as the Symbolic structures it was designed to fight (Irigaray 1974: 173, 178; Ragland-Sullivan 1986: 273; Weed 1994: 101–02).