Many intelligent, reasonable people regard literary theory as the equivalent of -- well, if not of drinking sand, then at least of drinking motor oil. And Cornell English Department chair and Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature Jonathan Culler is well aware of that belief.

"Theory is intimidating," Culler writes in his latest book, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 1997). "One of the most dismaying features of theory today is that it is endless. It is not something that you could ever learn so as to 'know theory.' Theory is thus a source of intimidation, a resource for constant upstagings: 'What? you haven't read Lacan! How can you talk about the lyric without addressing the specular constitution of the speaking subject?'"

Oxford University Press approached Culler about doing Literary Theory in part because he had written "little books on Ferdinand de Saussure and on Roland Barthes for the Fontana Modern Masters Series," Culler said.

The Oxford Very Short Introduction Series books are aimed at the general reading public and undergraduates, and they include such fields as classics, politics, archeology, Buddhism and Judaism.

As advertised, Culler's book is very short -- roughly 35,000 words -- and even includes a few cartoons. And in a field not known for its easy-going, graceful style, Culler's prose is deft, lucid and often witty -- a kind of Fred Astaire dance over the martial music of some literary criticism. It takes on topics such as "What is literature and does it matter?"; the relation between literary and cultural studies; meaning in literature; performative language; identity and identification; the analysis of narrative; and the study of poetry.

"At times," Culler writes, "theory presents itself as a diabolical sentence condemning you to hard reading in unfamiliar fields, where even the completion of one task will bring not respite but further difficult assignments. ('Spivak? Yes, but have you read Benita Parry's critique of Spivak and her response?')."

Culler really does seem to feel the pain of some readers.

"A good deal of the hostility to theory no doubt comes from the fact that to admit the importance of theory is to make an open-ended commitment, to leave yourself in a position where there are always important things you don't know. But that is the condition of life itself," he continues.

So why do this thing that's so painful, humiliating and frustrating?

"The nature of theory is to undo, through a contesting of premises and postulates, what you thought you knew, so the effects of theory are not predictable. You have not become master, but neither are you where you were before. You reflect on your reading in new ways. You have different questions to ask and a better sense of the implications of the questions you put to works you read," Culler writes.

So the reader may end up not just with a sense of humility and some new questions, but perhaps with a whole different set of lenses through which to view literature, history, culture, texts, even the world. Culler's book, then, is nothing less than an invitation to the pleasures of thought.

Culler graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1966, won a Rhodes Scholarship, earned a B. Phil. from St. John's College, Oxford, in 1968, and a D. Phil. in modern languages from Oxford in 1972. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has published six books, including Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, which won the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association, and Roland Barthes. Three of his books have been widely translated.

"Jonathan Culler," writes Yale University's J. Hillis Miller, "has always been about the best person around at explaining literary theory without oversimplifying it or treating it with polemical bias."

"I hope to reach people who haven't studied literary theory and are curious about this now notorious topic," Culler said. "And I was eager to take advantage of the occasion to approach theory through topics rather than through schools -- a common mode of presentation that reduces theory to a set of competing doctrines."

There's a cartoon in Culler's Literary Theory which shows a man lying dead on a floor. Another man is picking a book up from the floor near the dead man's head, and still another man explains to a startled woman, "'He read for two straight hours without any training.'"

Culler's book gives the reader some training, and it makes the case that not only will literary theory not kill you, it may even be fun.