Theory Town

I organized my theorists into neighborhoods, adding some stylistic elements to particular houses (note: the poesy on Sidney’s house, the English vines on Eliot’s, and Plato’s giant house perched atop a cloud, signifying his theoretical godliness.) Rather than organizing the theorists into strict categories of influence or strict movements, I decided to group theorists who were in conversation with one another. For example, Augustine, Saussure, Eliot, and Maimonides all deal with ambiguity, multiplicity of meaning, and the consequent implications for language. Freud and Lacan live in smaller houses next to one another, denoting that the strongest ties of influence lie between Lacan reacting to Freud’s theories. However, they have Kant and Hegel as neighbors, theorists who connect to a much larger scope of theory.

I utilized Plato and Aristotle as founding members of Theory Town, and branched theorists out accordingly. The theorists are not grouped chronologically, though many end up with neighbors from their own period, like the Romantics, housed in the forest. Emerson, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and analogously Nietzsche and Schleiermacher, all produced work in the 1800’s that speaks to one another, developing the context of Romantic understandings of the poet, poetry, and experience. This group more neatly fits into a chronological grouping. However, Maimonides and Eliot are in the same neighborhood, though they exist more than seven hundred years apart. The stone paths between neighborhoods stand less as a walk through history than as an exchange of ideas. Moving from Augustine to Saussure to Barthes results not in a strict expansion upon Augustine, but instead contains the common thread of language as a series of signs, with each theorist having a specific orientation to that commonality, at once being quite individual and also part of a growing web of discourse.