THEORY AS A DISTINCT GENRE IN LITERARY STUDIES
THEORY AS A DISTINCT GENRE IN LITERARY STUDIES

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine literary theory by a generic approach, as a body of thinking and writings, a miscellaneous genre which challenges disciplinary boundaries and produces its own set of canonical texts within a specific organization and a discrete identity. I have chosen deconstruction as a basis for analyzing the major issues of literary theory and the ways in which it is historically constituted as a distinct genre, mainly by developing a set of rules circumscribed to the respective critical thinking. “The genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of order's principle: resemblance, analogy, identity and difference, taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order of reasons, sense of sense, truth of truth, natural light and sense of history”. Starting from the ideas expressed by Derrida in the above quotation, it is obvious that literary theory meets the order’s principle like any other genre, with the delineation of its scope and being subject to criticism and historical becoming.

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