The Birth of Counter Theory
As Popular Culture Studies find their way into our university curricula as an
accepted area of scholarly research and obtain some type of academic
credibility, they also become an ideal target for the intellectual imperialism of
Theory, which has already created a general climate of uncertainty as to the
practice and future of Literary Studies.1 Post-modern criticism, whether openly
ideologically oriented or not,2 has effectively hijacked the corpus of study itself,
i.e., literature, and literary scholarship has dissolved into an over-conceptualized
theoretical discourse with no clear orientation other than the expression of
personal ideological agendas; as a result, literary texts are no longer
contextualized nor interpreted but rather used as mere vehicles to promote a
particular set of ideas and convictions reflecting specific political concerns,
which, as justified and important as they might be, do not constitute a method of
approach. Literary works are studied as pretexts, or pre-texts, rather than as
texts and their individual significance tends to disappear behind a given
theoretical inquiry, the object of which is often itself. It appears urgent today to
prevent Theory from taking hold upon the field of Popular Culture by presenting
the empirical reasons for its uncanny success in spite of its blatant logical
abuses, and to