Joetta, I think that your anxieties about theory are something that need to
be taken seriously here.  I know of many grad. students who feel excluded from
what is going on in the seminars (and the dept. in general) because they don't
understand why they should have to tip their hats to the gatekeepers of this
discipline's dominant discourses.  In most seminars I've been in, a few voices
dominate during discussions because those voices speak the language of theory.
Nowadays, it seems that if one is a spokesperson for postcolonial theory, queer
theory, and theories having to do with Foucault, one tends to be taken more
seriously than others who don't subscribe to such theories, or those who for
one reason or another resist theory.
I should stress that this observation is a general one.  At one time, if one
didn't believe in New Criticism, one was shut out. Then other theories came
along and had their adherents for a time.  None of these theories is extinct--
I don't mean to imply that.But there are trends, and the pressure to latch on
to trends is often hard to resist.Of course, right now one has to be very
careful about expressing interest in, much less endorsement of, Marxist theory.
There are many reasons for this.One of the big ones right now seems to be that,
according to the vulgar postmodernists and poststructuralists, Marx is just
another dead white guy who fed the furnaces of enlightenment epistemologies and
grand metanarratives.  Bullshit.  To use a non-academic term.  But if one is
interested in Marxism, as I am, along with all the other theories I've
mentioned--yep, I still think we need to know T.S. Eliot and Leavis, and all
those patriarchs, especially if we're going to take cheap shots at them--if
one is interested in Marxism, one seems to be pressured to read the right kinds
of Marxists.  Jameson, of course.  But not Terry Eagleton, for some reason--
guess his stuff is written too lucidly.  And not Christopher Caudwell, for sure
.  And when someone tells me I'm not supposed to read these guys or take them
seriously, that's going to make me do precisely what I'm not supposed to do.
OK, I've digressed, here.  But while I am interested in theory, I too resist it
and share your anxieties.  I have a love/hate relationship with it for sure.
I try to be as egalitarian as I can in all areas of my life.  That's why I
think all of have the right to write seminar papers without using theory, and
also the right to expect those papers will be taken completely seriously and
read with respect and open minds.
As I said before, I know many people who want nothing to do with theory.  And
think I know at least one reason why--they feel that since they are not well-
versed in it by the institution's standards, they are being excluded from the
work that's going on here.  They are being, in a sense, technologically
estranged from the systems of intellectual production.  And like the workers
in the English  industrial revolutions of the 1800's, they want to smash the
machines that they don't understand, and that don't understand them.  And I
think this impulse to smash the machines--resist the theories--is, more often
than not, absolutely justified.--R. Pence