'Us Canoniz'd' John Donne '"I am an invalid, Dr. Middleton", he said,
"I am unable to cope with analogies.'" George Meredith
What relation between theory and practice is being promoted by the format that I have been asked to follow in this volume an exposition of a critical theory followed by an exemplary reading of a classical text? What place is being projected for methodological enquiry by the definition of various schools of criticism in opposition to classics and classical texts? There's classics and then there's . . .theory? There are some important questions that are in danger of being occluded in this mandate, and I want to begin by outlining four areas of worry.
The first risk in this organizational strategy is of implying that methodology is a supplement to reading rather than what makes reading possible. The greatest of all critical fictions is the claim of 'no methodology' a claim which may be naive but is never innocent. As Eagleton famously wrote 'An opposition to theory usually means an opposition to other people's theories and an ignorance of one's own'.1 Classics always has been a constantly developing, historically contingent, ideologically laden study. What 'modern critical theory' has placed on the agenda is the question of how explicit, how sophisticated and how self-aware a discussion of each and every critic's inevitable commitment to a methodology is to be.
The second risk of the Smorgasbord approach to theories is of implying that there is a range of discrete theories, each waiting to be intellectually evaluated and then adopted or rejected, wholly or piecemeal. While it is difficult to imagine an engagement with theory that did not privilege intellectual evaluation the unexamined life is not worth living for a critic above all it must not be forgotten that the degree to which a critical theory's questions or strategies are mobilized or absorbed into classics as a discipline also involves an institutional sociology. Each classicist is also involved in a network of power relations that police the academy: a
