When I was a junior in high school, I visited my older brother at University of Chicago, where he was a first-year math major. Every aspect of his college life appealed to me: the Gothic archways he walked through to get to class; his favorite study spot, a cozy cubby nestled among endless rows of books; his dorm-mates’ scientific analysis of the superhero movie they were watching, which evidently defied Newtonian physics but could conceivably be explained by recourse to string theory. In front of a statue honoring the first sequenced genome, we chatted with a friend of his whose UChicago t-shirt read, “That’s all very well in practice…but how does it work in theory?”
Theory and practice: the dichotomy traces back at least to Aristotle, who describes theoria as the pursuit of knowing and praxis as concerned with behavior. They are eternally at odds, and forever intertwined. Theory without practice risks inaccuracy and flirts with irrelevance; practice absent theory attempts a close attention to the world while remaining blind to its structuring patterns.
As a young person enamored with the life of the mind, though, I felt the contest had a clear front-runner. How much more powerful, to look at a mathematical function and understand how it worked—the asymptotes, the inflection points—instead of plotting dozens of coordinates and guessing how to scale the x axis. How much more meaningful, to figure out what makes a cause worth dying for, than to consider only Socrates with his cup of hemlock. Practice was the realm of error, of contingency: theory was where the deepest truths lay.
Two recent novels find an animating force in this tension. Rosalind Brown’s Practice (FSG, June 2024) and Michelle de Krester’s Theory & Practice (Catapult, Feb 2025) both center on young women in the midst of university degrees, and the two protagonists find their theoretical work continually infiltrated by experiences and relationships not on their reading lists. Brown’s Annabel, a 20-year-old Oxford student, attempts to write an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets for her tutorial the next day. But her thoughts frequently slip elsewhere, and her study of the Sonnets’ relationship dynamics becomes an inventive act that blurs the line between literary theory and literary practice. De Krester’s Cindy, a Sri Lankan-born Australian immigrant, recounts the 1980s studying English literature at the University of Melbourne. Cindy finds herself immersed in “High Theory”—scholarship by Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and others—which becomes the lens through which she filters her experiences in and out of the classroom. For both Cindy and Annabel, the intellectual and the personal move between porous boundaries. Compartmentalization, they suggest, would defy the potency of the ideas they find so absorbing.
Cindy lays out the project of Theory & Practice explicitly a few pages into the novel:
“Experiences I’d had, over time, with theory and practice kept coming into my mind. The smooth little word ‘and’ makes the transition from theory to practice seem effortless, but I’d rarely found that to be the case. As I recalled thrashing about in the messy gap between the two, I began to see that […t]he book I needed to write concerned breakdowns between theory and practice, and the material was overwhelming. Particles of it had entered my novel and jammed up its works.”
That last phrase recalls Luce Irigaray, a key figure of High The- ory, who calls for women’s writing to “jam the theoretical machinery”: only by radically revising the structures of language, Irigaray argues, can writers escape our culture’s entrenched bias toward the masculine. Theory & Practice shares these concerns. As Cindy takes us through memories of childhood, the formative years in Melbourne, and a coda several decades later, her exploration of “the messy gap” between theory and practice is intimately tied to the violence characters experience related to sexuality and gender: casually cruel comments; career discrimination; sexual assault.
The other theoretical machinery at stake, for Theory & Practice, is colonialism. Cindy endures slurs from neighbors and superficial soli- darity from wealthy white acquaintances, and her academic work gives her language to articulate the structures of racism around her, as well as its literary embodiments. Theory’s dense treatises promise to upend naïve literary encounters, revealing “crude essentialisms, bourgeois hegemonies, totalising mechanisms, humanist teleologies, squalid repressions, influential aporias, and many more textual fragilities.” The grandiosity of these claims is not lost on Cindy and her friends, who take theory as a frame to analyze their everyday lives with a mix of scholarly sincerity and ironic playfulness. One character says he and his girlfriend “have a deconstructed relationship”; Cindy, quoting Gramsci, wryly refers to her jealousy of another woman as a “morbid symptom.”
The characters’ theory-infused conversations allow the novel to investigate its titular tension: whether everyday life can sustain theoretical principles, or whether they unravel when faced by real feelings and experiences. The question arises most profoundly with respect to Woolf, whose work on feminism Cindy finds utterly compelling. But Woolf’s diary reveals an upsetting aspect of her politics. In a 1917 entry, she describes W.G. Perera—an official from Ceylon (British-occupied Sri Lanka) who risked his life to challenge British abuses of power—in condescending and dismissive terms. “The poor little mahogany coloured wretch has no variety of subjects. The character of the Governor, & the sins of the Colonial Office, these are his topics; always the same stories, the same point of view, the same likeness to a caged monkey, suave on the surface, inscrutable beyond.”
Woolf’s close attention to interiority, her trademark attunement to complex lives that strain against societal roles, is nowhere to be found. Cindy describes the experience of reading the diary entry in spare prose:
Cindy’s advisor suggests that Cindy “bracket off the diary” and “focus on the fiction.” But Theory & Practice demonstrates the impossibility of such bracketing off. The novel exhibits a kind of eternal return: childhood experiences ripple into adulthood; lovers leave one another only to be left themselves. Certain phrases reappear, functioning at times like inside jokes but also reflecting what Cindy and her classmates might identify as Derridean citationality: each reference links to its predecessors while constituting its own singular iteration. “Morbid symptoms”; “a mahogany-coloured wretch”: the phrases accumulate layers of resonance as de Krester deploys them in new contexts.
Theory & Practice positions Woolf herself within these structures of recurrence. Cindy recalls a line from A Room of One’s Own—“We think back through our mothers if we are women”—and coins the epithet “The Woolfmother” as a nod to Woolf’s inescapable influence on the women who write in her wake. A poster of Woolf hangs on Cindy’s wall, and the failing adhesive requires a regular decision: reaffix the poster? Or rip it to shreds?
Two years after my brother left for UChicago, I started at a college with its own Gothic architecture, study carrells, and dorm conversations. The students, though, seemed to have a more experimental bent. Could vodka really denature the proteins in an egg? Would a Nalgene break if it was filled with pennies and dropped off a balcony? These science fair exploits were interspersed with long conversations that were ostensibly theoretical, although in retrospect, they too were questions of practice. What does it mean to love, we debated one night in September, although the question really meant: was my boyfriend wrong to break up with me? Why didn’t my girlfriend want an open relationship? (Even more practically, the conversation was, of course, also a form of flirtation.) Another night’s inquiry: is stealing wrong if it undermines capitalism? But we were really talking about a trip to Alaska the prior summer, when one of us, deeply upset by an economic system imperiling the rugged northern wilderness, had stolen a bag of souvenirs from a local gift shop. Was he wrong to act on his righteous indignation? Were his parents wrong to make him return what he took? (This, too, of course: flirtation.)
In spring of sophomore year—by which time the flirtation had mostly subsided, having found more productive avenues beyond our third-floor cohort—we declared our majors. I had recently read Kant’s Critique of Judgment and decided I’d write a thesis on literary theory. When my senior fall arrived, I registered for two semesters of “Senior Honors Thesis.” The air was humid and the campus inescapably green. I walked up the hill to the library, where I checked out copies of Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn and Helen Vendler’s The Music of What Happens, printed out a few recent journal articles, and pored over their percipient sentences hoping to have an idea of my own.
Like de Krester, Brown grounds Practice’s central drama in the intellectual inquiry of her protagonist. Annabel spends nearly all day alone in her room as she coaxes her thoughts on the sonnets toward coherence. Brown describes her careful movements in patient detail, creating a meditative rhythm that situates the reader deep in her experience:
“Sitting down with her mug (and ignoring her bladder which is beginning to make itself known) she holds her mind firm and reads four sonnets in a row, slowly and with full awareness.
Ah, something, something comes. For a moment there she had him, his sonnet-voice: slick—bitter—nimble: that voice. A tiny effortful shuffle forward. It is already gone.”
One of the best things about Practice is that Annabel takes her intellectual life seriously, and so does the novel. It’s hard to have a new idea and to write it beautifully. It’s particularly hard to have a new idea about Shakespeare, about whom so much has already been said; and next to the sonnets, any prose feels wooden. “If she can write this essay she will be like a small snail successfully climbing a blade of grass,” Annabel thinks. “She could write to Helen Vendler and ask her, really, honestly, is it worth it, has it made you more contented, or just more aching?”
But a potent distraction hangs over Annabel’s thoughts. Her boyfriend, Rich—a doctor in his mid-thirties—wants to visit. Rich acknowledges how important Annabel’s work is to her, but his comments are laced with a condescension that he apologizes for yet can’t quite avoid. Like Theory & Practice, Brown’s novel is Woolf-infused, and Rich’s imposition evokes those Woolfian men—Mr. Ramsay, Mr. Dalloway—who loom over the women around them in search of sympathy and attention. “If he comes to visit everything will be different, all this, this chilled bright space in her head,” Annabel thinks; “all this will be squashed out for a few days, covered instead with a dark blanket which is his presence.” Of course, there would be consolations to Rich’s visit. “Nothing in even the best of the Sonnets can convincingly replicate the sensation of being fucked by him,” she acknowledges, imagining it: his body, his desire. “Anyway, she shouldn’t be thinking about Rich,”she chides herself; and imagines it again.
The Sonnets may not replicate physical sensation, then, but Annabel’s imagination just might. In fact, unlike the “dark blanket” of Rich’s actual presence, thoughts of him produce glimmers of Sonnet-re-lated insight: “The nervous older lover and the impatient beloved, she is starting to know a little about that.” She analyzes the Sonnets’ love triangle through an extended fantasy of two invented characters, The Scholar and The Seducer, setting encounters in motion and observing their dynamics: The Seducer’s irrepressible charm; The Scholar’s tightly-held longing. She gives them her own dilemmas as well. The Seducer wants to visit Oxford; Annabel narrates The Scholar’s non-committal reply.
There’s a preparatory quality to these imagined scenes—as if they were a test run for Annabel’s real-world relationships, a way to explore desires and inhabit scenarios from the privacy of her room. The novel traces Annabel’s literary practice, but it also asks how such practice relates to the broader world. Does the work she undertakes in her small room—in her capacious mind—prepare her for what lies outside it? Or does it keep her from it, a chrysalis she prefers not to shed?
Then again, perhaps her practice is the achievement: not prepa- ration for some fuller life, but itself the life she wants.
Thursday evening, early spring: I was out at a party when my thesis advisor emailed asking for a progress update. Perhaps an abstract of the whole project, she suggested, now that we’re halfway into the new semester? I left the party and sat on the couch outside my dorm room, where I tried to gather the various bits of thought I had documented since the fall into something like philosophical insight. After an hour or so, my hallmate left the party and joined me on the couch to finish a problem set on fluid dynamics. We sat there together working intensely until the sky began to lighten and my outline had transformed into something like an abstract. We had a friend with an espresso machine in his room; he was just waking up and made us each a drink. I sent the document to my advisor. Then my hallmate went to his fluid dynamics class and I went to sleep.
Brown and de Krester’s protagonists are both successful students— Cindy has a scholarship to Melbourne and Annabel won a department prize the prior spring—but they share a certain discomfort with the forms of writing required for their degrees. As Annabel reads the Sonnets, she pursues narrative thoughts more often than theoretical ones; and although Cindy produces her degree-mandated thesis, she feels dissatisfied with the form of attention that Theory asks of her. “I was squishing my ideas into the corset of Theory,” she reports, yielding a thesis that was “perfectly shapely and perfectly fulfilled the requirements of the university. I think of it now with a shiver of shame.”Both protagonists locate a narrowness to theoretical work, longing for a kind of thinking just beyond its bounds.
In fact, Aristotle’s framing of theory and practice includes a third element: poesis. If theoria is the domain of ideas and praxis of doing, poesis describes the realm of creativity—actions whose goal is not to do but to make. For Brown and de Krester, poesis acts as a structuring counterpoint to the theory and practice of their novels’ titles. A friend of Cindy’s, explicitly referencing Aristotle’s framework, proposes artistic creation as a response to Woolf’s complicated legacy. “Make a film, paint, write a poem,” she says. “Write back to Woolf.” The idea resonates with Cindy: disillusioned with academic scholarship, she goes on to become a novelist.
Annabel herself does not explicitly turn to fiction—she seems committed to continuing her academic work—but her creative energies throughout Practice offer a novel-within-a-novel, exploring the relationships between her imagined characters. In fact, her efforts to understand the Sonnets ultimately find their most compelling manifestation in her novelistic thoughts. What if her essay were a novel? one wants to ask. What if the best way to engage the Sonnets’ act of imagination is with a corresponding fantasy?
Theory was hardly to blame for the shortcomings of my own thesis. One (true) way to put it is that the theory itself was not very good. I had not reached the pinnacle of the form and come up against its limits: the limits were all my own. I did, in fact, incorporate poesis—brief narrative interludes depicted my struggle with the complexities of literary theory—but this did not strengthen the insights of the thesis so much as buttress its page count. The ideas were difficult and I wasn’t sure how to get traction on them.
At the end of the year, an outside examiner read my thesis and conducted an oral exam. I remember her comment, somewhere in the midst of the hour we spent together in a brightly-lit English department office: “Where are your examples?” I felt the deepest sinking feeling. It was so obvious in retrospect, and yet I was so blind to it as I was writing. “You have so carefully elaborated a theoretical approach to poetry,” she continued. “I was eager to see you read some poems.”
My investment in theory—despite its beginner’s engagement with poesis—had failed to leave any room for practice. Writing is always an act of making, that much was clear to me, and even as I remained committed to working through the ideas at hand, I recognized that poetics could be part of that work—perhaps was inevitably part of it. I didn’t yet understand that good theory also requires a willingness to follow ideas outside and into the world. Instead, I had built a two-legged stool.
Brown and de Krester’s novels both offer important attention to the value of poesis. But they do something more complicated than treating it as a middle way—that standard critical move!—that resolves the tension between theoria and praxis. Fiction, they show, poses problems of its own.
Annabel’s all-consuming literary practice means she misses important opportunities at human connection. Midway through the novel, her friend Bridget sends an unusually long text message; Annabel doesn’t reply. They run into each other later, and it’s clear Bridget has had a hard day. But Annabel can’t find the right words to support her friend, or perhaps she has already missed her chance; Bridget retreats into her own privacy. Cindy confronts a failed connection of her own, recalling an acquaintance whose inner life she had flattened out of jealously. “All those years ago I’d been careful not to see into Olivia,” she reflects, “preferring to create an effigy whose capacity for love and suffering and joy fell far short of mine.”
Cindy worries that fiction, with its window into other minds, ignores the challenge of real relationships, where others’ interiority is far less available. She disputes the idea that “the politics of novels were the politics of politics. They were not. What politics asked of us was to care about people we couldn’t see into, and the difficulty of that was the difficulty of life.” Annabel comes to a related realization: there are important things fiction cannot do. Late in Practice, she begins to recognize that she has certain responsibilities her characters do not. She thinks of a classmate who is sick and decides she will visit her in the hospital. “This is not what the scholar would do: but very clearly this is what she should do.”
And yet—these critiques coexist with the novels’ continued demonstration of the power and value of poesis. Brown and de Krester are less concerned to privilege a particular mode than to write opposing forces into a productive friction. In fact, for all Cindy’s quarrel with the novel genre, Theory & Practice exhibits the kind of fictionality she seems in search of. Rather than offering unfettered access to private lives, it regularly occludes our view of characters’ thoughts and feelings. Such blockages suggest that novels might themselves participate in the political work the narrator values: “to care about people we couldn’t see into.”
Brown, meanwhile, renders Annabel’s fictions with delicious ambivalence:
Sometimes it’s as if the SCHOLAR and SEDUCER work
together to lock her out, to bar her from comprehansiveness. […]
She has these vivid undeveloped notion, these micro-theories,
yes, but she cannot get to the essence of them. ALmost as if they
were real people. Almost is if they weren’t real people.“