A book is not a book but a text, and every text is at bottom a proof of the inefficacy of language. This scene—of a young American woman’s first encounter with French theory, the body of thought otherwise known as structuralism and post-structuralism—has by now been fictionalized several times over. In realist novels by members of what the critic Nicholas Dames called the “theory generation,” our heroine rarely takes kindly to theory. And if these novelists seem suspicious toward theory, it’s hard to begrudge them too much, given the way that theory was taught in American classrooms. That did not stop us from reading the way theory trained us to, reaching beyond the surface meaning of a text to “unmask” its repressed Other.