Author: Er Yanbing

Thoughts on being ‘post-theory’

By Dr Robert Irvine, Senior Lecturer in English Literature At some point, and perhaps already, someone at a conference or an interview may tell you that Literary Studies is now in a ‘post-theory’ phase. By this they will mean that ‘we don’t need to bother with literary theory anymore, let alone bother our students’. Don’t you believe it! Such a person can only be misunderstanding what ‘theory’ is, or what it means for something to be ‘post-’ something else, or both at once. They are probably also misunderstanding who ‘we’ are. If you hear this at a conference, slip out...