Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology

The purpose of art, according to the artist Banksy, is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. The purpose of that creative practice called “theory” is to disturb everyone-to perpetually unsettle all our staid assumptions, all our fixed understandings, all our familiar identities. Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology brings together a number of essential writings that have famously enacted the central purpose of theory.

An alternative to the conventional unwieldy theory anthology, Adventures in Theory offers a manageably short collection of critical statements crucial to the understanding of theory. It presents a relatively brief but steadily unsettling tour, spanning the most significant thought-provocations in the history of theoretical writing from Nietzsche and Freud, through Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, to Jameson, Spivak, Butler, and Edelman. Engagingly lean and enjoyably mean, Adventures in Theory is a minimalist anthology with maximal pedagogical impact.