This chapter takes up today’s literary and cultural theory as lacking attention to research
and classroom implementation. The National Standards for Foreign Language Learning,
I argue, can be used as a heuristic to develop these missing strategies, as they clarify what is
at stake in learning culture. This chapter calls for a more responsible approach to curriculum,
at all levels from beginner to graduate/professional, by focusing on appropriate stages
of cognitive development and by insisting that the theory project be integrated into concrete
and defensible pedagogical goals––an urgent necessity in a moment when institutional
demands on humanities departments are forcing the encounter between theory and praxis
