detheorising the ionosphere

 I still haven't decided what to read next...I keep chopping and changing...I'm reading articles, and I'm reading from a lot of books, but there's always something that comes up that makes me not want to continue with the book, and at the same time, I'm drawn away from each book by all the other books I want to read. 

at least I've been reading some good stuff....

I started Possessed by Memory, which was Harold Bloom's last book and I started My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, which I like because it's basically a story abut being maladjusted. I started reading a book called The Dialectical Imagination by Martin Jay, because I wanted to read something positive about cultural Marxism, critical theory, the Franfurt School - so, the historical background to a lot of the strands in the debate about critical theory. I've read a lot of negative stuff about that too - about the evils of political correctness, etc. I'm still kind of amazed at this whole vein of virulent opposition to critical theory coming from both academics and some Christians. 

It's something new to me. I didn't even realise this was a debate until recently. They're right - the people who bemoan the fact that critical theory has become embedded in the foundation of the academic enterprise, but the idea that that is something regrettable is new to me. 

The question I want to ask is, if you were to somehow get rid of theory, what would you replace it with? because theory - at least as far as my interest in it goes - is just a way of understanding and engaging with literature. That's from the point of view of a student/ teacher of English literature, so a sociologist or, say, a psychologist, would have a different view, and may see a different role for theory. 

I think there's a particularly close relationship between theory and literature though. Any scholar that writes about literature engages with theory because scholarship involves engaging with the 'field' - engaging with what other people have said about what you are writing about. And the way scholars talk about literature is grounded in theory. 

Here's an example, almost at random - In Wordsworth's Poetry: 1787 - 1814 (1964) by Geoffrey Hartman, he writes:

Descriptive Sketches is a poem of crisis, essentially of a crisis tending to occur in every poet qua poet....The poet's crisis may be described as follows: In waking to his own power he passes through a curious moment of blindness to it, which forces him to go out (i.e. to nature) rather than in. 

Where I have the ellipsis, Hartman writes something more specifically about Wordsworth, and then he returns to the same theme after the passage I've quoted. What makes the text meaningful as a work of scholarship, is the interaction between Hartman's observations specifically about Wordsworth and his poetry, and the more general statements - statements of theory - about the way poetry works. Hartman's statements about Wordsworth and his poetry are meaningful because they are grounded in a body of theory that other scholars recognise and accept.