Progress on the site was delayed by the start of classes and my role in organizing the inaugural conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association (Oct. 17-19, 2003); however, I have now completed the first set of modules in each of the critical schools above. The Modules now available are for Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva (under Psychoanalysis); for Roland Barthes, Peter Brooks, and Algirdas Greimas (under Narratology); for Michel Foucault and Judith Butler (under Gender and Sex); for Karl Marx, Fredric Jameson and Louis Althusser (under Marxism); for Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt (under New Historicism); and for Linda Hutcheon, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson (under Postmodernism). For the moment, "Theoretical Pursuit: A Self-Test Game" only addresses postmodernism, psychoanalysis and narratology.

Note that some of the sections above are more complete than others. Definitions, links, and other features in each section will continue to appear as I work on turning the Guide to Theory into a text-based introduction, tentatively titled Learning Theory through Pop Culture. This site will, therefore, be under continual construction and expansion until January 2006. For an explanation of what's to come, check out the Intro.

Scholarship on this site

Click here to read Elaine Showalter's discussion of my web material in Teaching Literature. Click here for her interview with me on her Teaching Literature web site. Prof. Showalter, Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Princeton and former president of the MLA, has an entire chapter in her book dedicated to how best to teach theory in the classroom, a great place to start for anyone looking for ideas. Click on the image of the book on the left for the amazon.com link. For a second work that makes mention of this site in terms of the effects of the web on human consciousness, see Thomson, Douglass H., "The Work of Art in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production," Romanticism On the Net 10 (May 1998), January 2002, <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/work.html>.

To Users of the previous Guide to Theory:

Everything that existed in the previous site also exists on this site (albeit with modifications). That includes the readings of Spenser's Sonnet 37 and 74, which you can find under the Applications section of Gender & Sex, Marxism, New Historicism, and Psychoanalysis. As a second application, I have in each section included a reading of the Dürer image associated with that section of the Guide to Theory. (The Dürer interpretations under New Historicism and Gender & Sex, however, are still under construction.) You can also click on the rhino above.

Netscape 6 and Opera users: Please read the information in the Guide link.