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Popular Culture Review
the fear of having nothing to say has forced many to adopt modem Theory
discursive practices in order to establish and preserve textual authority, letting
post theoretical discourse speak for them in an endless self-referential dance of
empty signifiers.17
In the end, the rise and empire of Theory are due, for the most part, to the
elementary need to put food on the table; from publish or perish to theorize or
agonize, an entire “school of thought” seems to have bom been out of sheer
professional necessity. Our first priority today, as literary and cultural scholars,
should be to clearly define our area of research and to differentiate it from the
study itself, both conceptually and in practice, by using an essentially
monosemic language. The definition of Popular Culture’s object of study and its
limits is as problematic, if not more, than that of Literature, but remains
nonetheless crucial in order to envision a coherent evolution of Cultural Studies,
free from the intellectual colonization of Theory, which enslaves the corpus of
study to its own agendas and preoccupations to the point of literally erasing it
from the analysis. What is at stake here is t