An introduction to literary theory unlike any
other, Ten Lessons in Theory engages its readers with
three fundamental premises. The first premise is that a
genuinely productive understanding of theory depends
upon a considerably more sustained encounter with the
foundational writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud than any reader is likely to get from the
introductions to theory that are currently available.
The second premise involves what Fredric Jameson
describes as "the conviction that of all the writing
called theoretical, Lacan's is the richest."
Entertaining this conviction, the book pays more (and
more careful) attention to the richness of Lacan's
writing than does any other introduction to literary
theory. The third and most distinctive premise of the
book is that literary theory isn't simply theory "about"
literature, but that theory fundamentally is literature,
after all. Ten Lessons in Theory argues, and even
demonstrates, that "theoretical writing" is nothing if
not a specific genre of "creative writing," a particular
way of engaging in the art of the sentence, the art of
making sentences that make trouble - sentences that
make, or desire to make, radical changes in the very
fabric of social reality. As its title indicates, the
book proceeds in the form of ten "lessons," each based
on an axiomatic sentence selected from the canon of
theoretical writing. Each lesson works by creatively
unpacking its featured sentence and exploring the
sentence's conditions of possibility and most radical
implications. In the course of exploring the conditions
and consequences of these troubling sentences, the ten
lessons work and play together to articulate the most
basic assumptions and motivations supporting theoretical
writing, from its earliest stirrings to its most current
turbulences. Provided in each lesson is a working
glossary: specific critical keywords are boldfaced on
their first appearance and defined either in the text or
in a footnote. But while each lesson constitutes a
precise explication of the working terms and core tenets
of theoretical writing, each also attempts to exemplify
theory as a "practice of creativity" (Foucault) in
itself.
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