Literary theorist and critic Jean-Michel Rabaté explains what literary theory is, how he came to teach it and how he thinks of it as a kind of conceptual or performance art. Rabaté has written about Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Jacques Lacan, among others. His recent books include The Ethics of the Lie (Other Press), 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Wiley-Blackwell), The Future of Theory (Wiley-Blackwell) and The Cambridge Companion to Jacques Lacan (Cambridge University Press); he has also co-edited William Anastasi’s Pataphysical Society (Slought Books) and Hélène Cixous' Ex-Cities (Slought Books). He is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania (27 minutes).