heory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions, and urther, an attempt to show that what we take for granted as common ense is in fact a historical construction, a particular theory that has ome to seem so natural to us that we don't even see it as a theory. As a itique of common sense and exploration of alternative conceptions, ieory involves a questioning of the most basic premisses or sumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that might