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Early in Mark Twain"s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we learn about Tom Sawyer"s gang and his "deep laid" plans, for Tom and his innr circle of friends dedicate one memorable occasion to working out such details: the name of the gang, its objectives, its general line of business-its modus operandi. But there are problems, namely, problems of interpretation. After all, not everybody defines "gang" the same way These interpretive problems are not insurmountable, so we discover, but they are real, at least for a few enchanted moments in the narrative:
"Now" says Ben Rogers, "what"s the line of business of this Gang?"
"Nothing only robbery and murder," Tom said.
"But who are we going to rob?-houses, or cattle, or-"
"Stuff! stealing cattle and such things ain"t robbery; it"s burglary," says Tom Sawyer. "We ain"t burglars. That ain"t no sort of style. We are highwaymen. We stop stages and carriages on the road, with masks on, and kill the people and take their watches and money."
"Must we always kill the people?"
"Oh, certainly It"s best. Some authorities think different, but mostly it"s considered best to kill them-except some that you bring to the cave here, and keep them till they"re ransomed."
"Ransomed? What"s that?"
"I don"t know But that"s what they do. I"ve seen it in books; and so of course that"s what we"ve go to do."
"But how can we do it if we don"t know what it is?"
"Why, blame it all, we"ve got to do it. Don"t I tell you it"s in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what"s in the books, and get thins all muddled up?"
It is dlfficult to argue that Tom SawyeL under any circumstances, is a reliable reader of literary texts. Yet anddst this already "muddled up" but delightfully humorous conversation, Tom is right about one thing: books carry a certain cultural authority They can and do influence the way a person understands human experience, even if that same person makes no claim to be
an avid reader. Tom Sawyer is certainly not the model reader, nor was he ever the model student. But his cocksure knowledge of books, however boyishly obtained, is telling nonetheless.
Readers are still intensely interested in understanding "what"s in the books." It is a task, in fact, made all the richer and at the same time more difficult, given the great variety of critical approaches to lit6rary texts, and the decades of theoretical debates, political wrangling, and culture wars. In her book West of Everything, Jane Tompkins has accurately described such conflicts in the discipline as "academic shootouts" (230). Even in the late afternoon of theory, however, the dust has not settled. Terry Eagleton"s admonition is as true now as it was when he first offered it: "Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other peoPle"s theories and an oblivion of one"s own" (Literary Theom viii). But just what constitutes "theory" and its various uses is still a hotly debated subject, yet one worth pursuing.
Not all critics share Eagleton"s views on the subject. Denii Donoghue asserts, "If theory is merely experimental of . as we say, heuristic, we do well to take it to mind if not to heart, and give it a run for whatever money we risk on it. But if it is offered to us as a creed or a vision or a doctrine, we should approach it much more skeptically and estimat6 the consequence of taking it to heart and soul." In Shakespearean criticism, for instance, Donoghue cont6nds that Eagleton"s committhents to "theory" have amounted to what he calls a "New Thematics": the "queering" of "one disciplineeliterary criticism--with the habits of anothersocial science or moral interrogation" (The Practice Of Reading 66--67). This one tension is only representative of the many that exist in response to "what"s in the books," that persistent question.
Charles Bressler"s Literary Criticism, Third Edition, invites readers not only into the debate but also into the larger literary convers