The Fall of Literary Theory

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Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen. The Fall of Literary Theory

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THE FALL OF LITERARY

A 21st Century

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Literary studies is a field with the privilege of direct access to identities, selves, from near and far, from the beginning of time, or rather from the time when the very quest for an origin and for signification allowed itself to be traced, and all the way forward, to the end of signification and the death desire of culture, in apocalyptic imaginings. Literature gives access to a database of questions that have been asked before. Identity is not an understanding, a satisfied closure, but it can only be seen in a continuum, which is why one has to be immersed into this questioning, not simply expect the vision to be embodied by the ideal professor who has never even claimed to exist.

Postructuralist analysis has been endlessly criticized for not being a shortcut to knowledge, but this is not its purpose. In analyzing a literary text this way, deconstructing it, digging for the spaces where identity is and is not, that is what can still be done, whether “theory” is out of fashion or not. A narrow definition of “theory” may be out of fashion, but its symptomatic, rather than axiomatic engine of questioning keeps running past the words chosen to name it, words that, of course, sooner or later lose their adherents.

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