Authors we are in danger of accepting as gospel, whereas founders of discursivity provide permeable ideas that we can elaborate upon in a tradition of constructive dialogue.
I make a distinction between theory and methodology, the latter being the practical deployment of a premise. Theory on the contrary may well be applied, hence becomes methodology without a hitch, but isn't necessarily practical at all.
The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.
I'm a fan or naysayer like everyone else, not an authority of any kind.
I beg my reader to consider the "evidence" I provide for my case and perhaps feel persuaded as a result. Beyond that I make no claim.
Both the 18th and the early 20th centuries, however, feature brilliant attacks on originality, and it's no doubt one of the hallmarks of romanticism to care about originality and suppose with a sometimes naive spontaneity that it's all that matters.
I'm not only a romanticist but a romantic myself. I take it for granted the originality matters.
The basic change in the landscape since my salad days started with the defensive rediscovery of history and politics by all the theoretically-oriented academics in the late seventies and eighties.
The rhetoric of theory is always in a bind. It pronounces ideas and denounces failures to accept or grasp them while insisting that there are no grounds either for accepting or grasping ideas.
The mantra of the new historicists was "we have betrayed ourselves." Since their emergence, there have been more or less interesting paradigm shifts having mainly to do with Habermas and the increased focus on media studies, but the talismanic word has never ceased to be "history."
I do identify the escape hatch through which Foucault eludes the charge that he himself is an author/authority, hence a tyrant. He establishes the category of "founder of discursivity" for the authors he likes. Slippery, perhaps, but you can see what he means.
Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.
I don't think theory adds to criticism. (Methodology does, for better or worse.) Theory's function is to make criticism self-conscious, maybe even a little sheepish, about its ex cathedra pronouncements.
I myself always want to talk about "poetry," not "the poem."
Although I don't disagree that utterances express desires and try to make complexities precise, I actually don't think at all that any of our efforts to speak and mean things are ultimately why we speak.
Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power.
Satire about any and all professionals with a special vocabulary has been a staple of fiction and popular ridicule since the 18th century.
