Richard Matheson and the Twilight Fantastic
On the Theoretical Front
One of the most pernicious effects of the poststructuralist meta-critical excesses that
have characterized the major trends in literary research for the last three decades is
doubtlessly the voluntary erasure of both the limits of our corpus of study and those of our
endeavor; as literary criticism becomes, in the words of Jonathan Culler himself, “an
unbounded corpus of writing about everything under the sun” (3), the very object of literary
science appears more distant and undefined than ever. Naturally, generic studies have been
quickly sacrificed upon the altars of Lacanian or Derridian thought, which have stirred our
discipline into a series of logical dead- ends, for merging with psychoanalysis or philosophy is
hardly a viable idea when it comes to distinguishing literary studies from neighboring fields,
and can only lead our discipline to its dissolution.1 Some of the most classical deconstructionist
arguments, which are today considered all but axiomatic, have been utterly detrimental to
further the comprehension of our object of study, for they have cemented the notion that All is
the Text and the Text is All - we are all by now very familiar with the famous Derridian quote,
7/ n ’y a pas de hors-texte" (227), which, conveniently mistransl ated into English as “There is
nothing outside the text,"2 has become a sanctified authorization to consider everything as
possible literature - after all, Paul de Man did state that the difference between literature and
literary criticism was “delusive" (33), without however specifying to which type of literature or
literary criticism he was referring. Fortunately, this is obviously not the case, for then, most
literary critics would fail to establish any type of textual authority based upon the aesthetic
value of their work. The reasons for theory’s flight in our field are exposed elsewhere (Ferreras
Savoye, 2009); for our purpose, suffice to say that, as literary scholars, our obligation seems to
be precisely the opposite of that imposed by over-conceptualized post-modem criticism: to
1 Ultimately, through its desperate attempts to ape the conceptual apparatuses of neighboring fields, post
structuralism is only actively working towards the dissolution of the identity of literary studies.
2 “Hors-texte" in French is a technical word used in the printing profession and which refers to an added
illustration or plate inside a book; the following quote should be therefore translated as “There are no illustrations”
or “There are no images,” which, within its original context is perfectly understandable, albeit a tad redundant obviously, all w e have left from Rousseau is text and no pictures (S ee D e la Grammatologie, 227); this ill-inspired
English translation has becom e a dogmatic statement, falsely legitimized by its attributed authorship, which has
allowed literary criticism to enter the realm of m eta-theory and to lose sight of the literary.
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