Culler, Jonathan. “Literary Theory.” In Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi. 2nd ed. (New York: MLA, 1992): 202-238.
[T]heory in literary studies seems more concretely diverse in its concerns than philosophy has been, at least in modern times….At times, theory presents itself as a diabolical sentence to hard reading in unfamiliar fields where the completion of one task brings not respite but further difficult assignments….
The unmasterability of theory is as major cause of resistance to it. No matter how well versed you may think yourself, you can never be sure whether you ‘have to read’ Jean Baudrillard, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Wayne Booth, Hélène Cixous, C.L.R. James, Jürgen Habermas, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, and I.A. Richards or whether you can ‘safely’ forget them….A good deal of the hostility to theory no doubt comes from the fact that to admit the importance of theory is to make an open-ended commitment, to leave oneself in a position where there are always important things one doesn’t know. But this is very much the condition of life itself, especially in the realm of literature—though one function of a literary canon is to conceal this. The principal virtue of a canon, one might say, is that you know what to feel guilty about not having read. You can then either flaunt or hide the fact that you have never actually read The Magic Mountain or didn’t get past book 1 of the Fairie Queene or could never abide Balzac. Today, with the canon opening or expanding in all directions…is no longer clear what a professor of Spanish or English…is supposed to know. The reach of theory vastly compounds this problem for both teachers and students, creating possibilities of anxiety about one’s ignorance of philosophy or psychoanalysis or the history of the body, for instance.
Theory is not a domain one could ever master, though it simultaneously presents mastery as a goal (you hope that theoretical reading will give you the concepts, the metalanguage, to order and understand the phenomena that concern you) and makes mastery impossible, not just because there is always more to know but more specifically and perhaps more painfully because theory is itself the questioning of presumed results and the assumptions on which they are based. The nature of theory, by this account, is to undo, through a contesting of premises and postulates, what you thought you knew, so that there may appear to be no real accumulation of knowledge or expertise.