Hey,
I'm with you, epigone.
As a teacher, I am glad that theory exists since it gives me a principled way to present perspectives and readings of texts other than my own.
I am always surprised by how many otherwise tolerant and intelligent readers get driven into a blind rage by the very idea that someone may have a different -- even a radically different -- perception of a text, or of the act of writing, than they have. I suppose a lot of it has to do with getting burned by departmental politics in Grad School, which I haven't had to deal with.
It's often the highly literate who raise these objections to theory. It's all well and good to argue for personal experience and personal interpretation when you have always had a strong foundation in the subject and when you have developed confidence early. I teach students who may not have read a book in the last year, students who never pick up a book unless it's assigned. Such students do not have a strong foundation and are not at all confident in their own readings. I have found them very receptive to hearing many different theories about what I have asked them to read. First, theory distills the understanding that comes from reading many more books than they will ever have cause to do. Second, the variety of theoretical perspectives helps justify and locate their own understandings of the text within a flexible framework.
Those of us who have never felt lost in the forests of bookland have no idea of how helpless students can feel when they're dropped off in the middle and told to find their way out without compass or map.
But reading-rich or money-rich, it's all the same. Those that are born with it think it's so easy to get.
-Dan
[This message has been edited by Daniel Pereira (edited October 08, 2005).]
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