When I was in grad school, in the mid- and late 1980s, I hung out with a self-proclaimed Theory Crew. That is, we were taken with theory, signing up for all the theory courses we could and avoiding traditional staples like the “History of the English Language,” buying as many volumes of the Minnesota Theory and History of Literature series as we could afford after paying the rent, writing papers replete with ideologemes, lexic codes, phallocentricity, aporias, différance, and the like, probably much to the chagrin of the senior professors in our respective departments, and quoting Derrida, Cixous, de Man, Althusser, Jameson, and the rest when we got together every Thursday night, after seminar, at our favorite local dive Tara's, with large green shamrocks on the walls and dollar burgers. In a very real sense, theory – whether in seminar or at Tara's – was what professionalized us.

When we started writing our dissertations, none of us wanted to do the usual thing – say, to write on a relatively unattended literary text by a safe author – but we all wanted to take on big texts and big theoretical topics, so we projected our own nascent series, in the manner of the party game adding “ – in bed,” prefixed with “Big” and forbidding subtitles: The Big Allegory, Big/De/construct/ion, gender (with the masculinist “Big” under erasure), and, for me, Big Narrative.