Satire about any and all professionals with a special vocabulary has been a staple of fiction and popular ridicule since the 18th century.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.