I HAVE BEEN ASKED to write this piece partly because of my connection with the Development of University English Teaching Project (DUET). It therefore seems appropriate to open with a few remarks about DUET and why it might provide a ground for a discourse about literary theory. project was initiated in 1979 to study the subject matter, teaching methods, and practical applications of English studies in higher education. At an early stage it seemed that to work entirely in terms of printed materials and writing up, as in conventional research, would be to collude with some of the problems the project was trying to investigate: separations between theory and practice, the blocking of creativity, resistance to personal and institutional reflexivity. project has thus worked principally in terms of workshops, held at the University of East Anglia, with a membership-from professors to undergraduates-drawn from academia; from a wide variety of tertiary institutions; and, of course, from a range of theoretical stances and beliefs.1 aim of each workshop is to present itself as a working model of teaching and learning. No formal papers are given; instead, members of staff present samples of their own practices, and these are available for participation, and for reading as a text, by the members. This is the substance of the Academic Development Event, one of the major strands which interweave in the workshop; there is also a Group Event, which consists of a number of sessions in which a small group of members, with the help of a consultant, is invited to study its own behavior and relate this as appropriate to outside practice. Group Event draws on the tradition of group study developed by the Tavistock Institute and various related bodies.2 In the section of S/Z called The Weaving of Voices, Barthes notes: The five codes create a kind of network, a 'topos' through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text).... We are, in fact, concerned not to manifest a structure but to produce a structuration.3 These metaphors have always been crucial to DUET; the workshops are designed to promote a kind of experiential learning, in the course of which the individual can come to see himor herself as a partici-