Popular Culture Review Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 2009 | Page 18

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.