 |
 |
Cliff Davidson is absolutely right that there is a great deal of badly written, badly thought out, pretentious prose currently in the marketplace masquerading as theory, some of it so narrowly ideological that it's hard to imagine who would find it persuasive. Let me recommend Bryan Palmer's book <Descent into Discourse> as a blunt demolition job on much of that stuff, or Raymond Tallis's <Not Saussure> as a more measured riposte. But I don't think we can impeach theory simply because some people do it badly, any more than we can impeach archival research on the same grounds. Some questions raised by theorists are well worth our attention; we want to be careful not to discard the baby with the bathwater. To quote (badly) John Maynard Keynes, who was of course speaking to fellow economists: those who say they don't need theory or who say they can work perfectly well without theory are simply in the grip of an older theory. Cliff's belief in "the local context" as "the prime target of investigation at this time" makes him, to that extent, a postmodernist. _______________________________________________________________________ William Ingram, English Dept, Univ of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1045 e-mail: [log in to unmask] fax (departmental): 313 763 3128 -----------------------------------------------------------------------