Popular Culture Review Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 2009 | Page 14

10 Popular Culture Review study from discursive and ideological manipulations; our object of research has to remain Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” rather than Johnson’s study of Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s analysis of himself through “The Purloined Letter.” The sheer amount of theoretical writing, which in some cases is used mostly for territorial purposes,15 is enough to discourage any student of Literary or Cultural studies. Would the reading of De la Grammatologie or Glas help in understanding the meaning of Watchmen? Can Culler’s anti-definition of Literary Theory (“Any theory about anything under the sun”) provide any type of methodological orientation as to the interpretation of a text or a narration? By taking itself as its own object of inquiry and purposefully complicating both discourse and textual issues, post-modern Theory has yielded very little in terms of usefulness and has only succeeded in separating us from our true object of inquiry, which must remain Literature and Narration rather than Theory For Theory’s Sake. Counter Theory must naturally reject the confusion between text and context. The act of interpretation consists in relating a text to a context, whether that of the author and his society, as in the case of historical and sociological studies, or that of the reader and his or her society in this particular moment in time, as in the case of structuralist or semiotic studies. One can begin from the context and relate it to the text, a process which would correspond to the historical/sociological approach, or on the contrary, start from the text and relate it to a context, whether social or linguistic, a process that would characterize structuralist and semiotic methods. Needless to say, both of these approaches imply the existence of a context. If the three basic elements at the core of any form of communication, that is the sender, the message, and the destinatary are fused into the wide, all-encompassing notion of text, a basic credo of post structuralism, then any interpretative act is rendered simply impossible. The evolution of Literary Studies reveals a series of shifts between these three basic elements: traditional, historical inquiries based themselves upon the sender; formalist and