Abstract
Taking stock of the ‘history and current condition of theory’ for teaching purposes in 2011, Richard Bradford diagnosed ‘the ongoing, curious—though apparently not atrophied—condition of After Theory’ for the disciplines of literary and cultural studies (Bradford 1–2). While there is certainly a lot of theoretical thinking being done, there seems to be no unifying paradigm which could serve as a platform for dialogue between the various theoretical interests that can be identified, such as, for example, the renewed interest in the phenomenological side of reading processes that figures the (reading of a) text as an event (see Attridge; Felski 2008; Wiemann), the increased acknowledgement of the foundational importance of media history for all cultural (and that includes theoretical) practices and formations (see, for example, Siskin and Warner), the impact of cognitive approaches on a variety of fields in the humanities (see Zunshine), the turn towards notions of a cultural ecology in the larger context of complexity thinking (chaos theory, systems theory, self-organization, posthumanism; see, for example, Morton; Wolfe), or the longing for ‘new sociologies of literature’ (Felski and English) and other hotspots of theoretical debate identified by the journal New Literary History under Rita Felski’s editorship.
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Middeke, M., Reinfandt, C. (2016). Introduction: The Place of Theory Today. In: Middeke, M., Reinfandt, C. (eds) Theory Matters. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47428-5_1
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