14
Popular Culture Review
“Semiology,” 33). “Theory in this sense is not a set of methods for literary study but an
unbounded corpus of writing about everything under the sun . . . ” (Culler, “Literary
Theory,” 203 and Introduction, 3).
12 In Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Eco reminds us of a very useful difference
between “interpreting” a text and merely “using” it to support an argument fundamentally
external to the text (68). Modem Theory has gone as far as simply substituting the
original text with its own production.
13 This is by no means intended to deny the importance of sexual heteroglossia as a very
valid and important theme of research; for instance, the latent homosexuality of Don
Julian, the main protagonist of Pardo Bazan’s great 19th century Spanish naturalistic
novel, The House o f Ulloa, is worthy of scholarly attention for it plays an organizing role
within the economy of the narration. The same could be said within Popular Culture of
the dynamic duo Batman and Robin, whose homosocial relationship usually influences
the narrative syntagm. However, we must use either a structuralist/textual approach or a
sociological one in order to define the diegetic importance of this homosexual pulsion;
homosexuality is not in itself a method of interpretation.
14 This conception of an all encompassing, ideologically motivated Theory often leads to
a somewhat cavalier attitude towards the primary sources, i.e., works of fiction or
cinema, which are only considered inasmuch as they serve the general purpose of the
essay. For instance, in her Epistemology o f the Closet, renowned gender theorist
Sedgwick comments upon Diderot’s novel La Religieuse (73) and refers to its author in
the index as “Jacques Diderot” (254). Famous 18th century philosopher Diderot’s first
name is actually Denis, “Jacques” being the protagonist of his most well-known novel
Jacques le Fataliste; in English Studies, the equivalent would be to mention The
Adventures o f Tom Sawyer and to attribute them to a certain “Huckleberry Twain.”
15 Jonathan Culler’s essay entitled “Literary Theory”, published in the MLA’s
Introduction to Scholarship, enumerates very early on 10 “important” theorists, in order
to establish an unquestionable authority, which, paradoxically enough, has nothing to do
whatsoever with Literature itself; Culler’s essay was re-packaged with some alterations
under the name of A Very Brief Introduction to Literary Theory, and although the list is
reduced to seven names, it still works as part of the intimidation strategy that
characterizes post-modern criticism. Post-modern critical authority is derived from the
knowledge of other critics rather than of the object of study itself, which remains, albeit
only in theory, Literature.
16 As early as 1942, the French thinker and essayist Brice Parain pondered the
fundamental play between words and their meaning in Recherches sur la nature et les
fonctions du language. In a more metaphorical manner, Lewis Carroll already suggested
a similar idea in Through the Looking Glass, when Humpty-Dumpty refers to some
words as being words portmanteaux (coat hangers) (228). Lewis Carroll uses the French
word in the text, albeit modifying its spelling, not unlike Derrida did with his famous
differance, and thus, we find in the world of Alice in Wonderland an improbable,
although quite significant, antecedent to post-modern French Criticism.
17 One of the most paradoxical, if not surrealistic aspects of modem, obscure theoretical
discourse resides in the fact that post-structuralism, at large, and deconstruction, in
particular, do not believe in the possibility of enunciating a “true” message; in other
words, we are letting a discourse rooted in the disbelief of true communication do the
talking.