ABSTRACT
While the recent developments in critical humanities have often sounded the death of literary theory and the arrival of the post-theory age, it remains to be seen how the demise of literary theory is circumscribed within a particular regime of relevance that harks back to an earlier Enlightenment yearning for an unattainable and uncategorizable “other” regarding the literary text(s) and its radical unconscious. The enunciation of different theoretical paradigms for reading literary texts is intricately linked to the rise of different discursive regimes of power and interpretive structures that shape and affect contemporaneity and the reading practices of the times. From the rise of formalism as a methodical structure to the recent developments in precarity studies and global south studies, the contours of the post-theory world are still haunted by the theory machine that endeavours to resist easy meanings, smug interpretive structures and the desire to confine literary texts within cloistered meaning making processes.
