engl-300: Introduction to Theory of Literature

Lecture 1 - Introduction [January 13, 2009]

Chapter 1. Introduction [00:00:00]

Professor Paul Fry: I thought I'd begin today--this [gestures to outline on chalkboard] is, by the way, the regular practice. This is as close as I get to bulleted Power Point. It's all there. I ought to have got through those topics by the end of the lecture. If I don't, not to worry. I'll pick up wherever the dotted line emerges in the subsequent lecture.

In any case, I thought I'd begin today by making a few remarks about the title of our course because it has some big words in it: "theory" and "literature," but also "introduction." I think it's worth saying a word or two about the word "introduction" as well.

Now the word theory has a very complicated etymological history that I won't trouble you with. The trouble with the etymology of theory and the way in which the word has been used traditionally is that sometimes it actually meanspractice, and then at other historical periods it means something very different from practice, something typically from which practice is derived. Well, that's the sense of theory that I like to work with, and I would pause over it by saying that after all, there is a difference and practice and we shouldn't too quickly, at least, confuse the terms. There's a difference between theory and methodology. Yes, it's probably fair enough to say that methodology is applied theory, but there's a great danger in supposing that every aspect of theory has an immediate application. Theory is very often a purely speculative undertaking. It's an hypothesis about something, the exact nature of which one needn't necessarily have in view. It's a supposition that whatever the object of theory might be, theory itself must--owing to whatever intellectual constraints one can imagine--be of such and such a form.

At this level of abstraction, plainly there isn't all that much incentive to apply thinking of that kind, but on the other hand undoubtedly theory does exist for the most part to be applied. Very frequently, courses of this kind have a text--Lycidas, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a short story--and then once in a while the disquisition of the lecture will pause, the text will be produced, and whatever theory has recently been talked about will be applied to the text; so that you'll get a postcolonial reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner--something, by the way, which is absolutely fascinating and important to do--and so on through the course.

Now I suppose it's my reluctance to get into the intricacies of questions having to do with applied theory that makes me prefer to keep it simple. Our text is a story for toddlers called Tony the Tow Truck. I've decided not to pass it out today because, after all, I want to get it into the right hands! You can't read it unless you take the course!--and so I'm going to wait a little bit. [holds up the text] We won't come back to it at least for the moment, but you see that it's mercifully short, and as time passes we will do some rather interesting tricks with it. We will revert, as others revert to Lycidas, to Tony the Tow Truck for the purpose of introducing questions of applied theory.

Now this choice may suggest a certain condescension both toward theory and toward literary text, which is not at all intended. It's much more a question of reminding you that if you can do it with this, you can do it with anything; but also of reminding you that, after all, reading--reading just anything--is a complex and potentially almost unlimited activity. That's one of the good things that theory teaches us and that I hope to be able to get across in the course of our varied approaches to Tony the Tow Truck.