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