One of the challenging stances that this collection adopts—asking what early modern French literature might bring to theory and the present day rather than what theory may bring to early modern literature—implies a critical response to the common conception of theory as ‘used’ or ‘applied’. This has probably been the most widespread model since the early days of what is now called theory, which is to say the late 1960s and early 1970s in the US, where the notion of theory was mainly imported into literature programmes despite its origins in European philosophy. The import was often a vulgarized version that reduced vast sets of complicated concepts to methodologies that could be put to use for producing even more readings of literary texts. Whereas one of the reasons for the early interest in theory was that it complicated notions of text, writing, reading, and their institutionalization, the ‘application’ model has always aimed for re-simplification. In this essay, I will respond to the vulgar model by considering the relationship between, on the one hand, recent and contemporary theorization of the phenomenon of matter, and on the other, early modern literature that addresses the same subject.

Theorizing the French Renaissance

Despite its enduring popularity, the application model has long met with explicit contestation from theorists themselves.