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