Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The death of literary theory has been announced many times. Critics such as Terry Eagleton and Martin McQuillan have written essays on post-theory or the situations ‘after theory’ - as if the age of theory in which poststructuralism and deconstruction were buzzwords was drawing to a close. However, there are counternarratives. For example, Vincent B. Leitch published a book called Literary Criticism in the 21st Century with the subtitle of Theory Renaissance, claiming that theory has already made a comeback. In this paper, I explore how, and under which guise, the return to theory has been formulated through the analysis of the changing circumstances regarding the renewed foundational concepts of spatiality, temporality, and identity politics. It is my argument that various turns we have experienced since the turn of the millennia, be they the affective turn, the spatial turn, or the posthuman turn, have been part and parcel of these configurational changes. In other words, literary theory might not disappear, but has been reformulated and reconfigured in the framework of these changing conditions.