Post-Theory and the discourses of the new introductory reading - foreword by Jonathan D Culler and Ronald Strickland

Post-Theory and the Discourses of the New: Introductory Readings Abstract: It has been widely argued that criticism and literary theory have undergone radical transformations during the early decades of the twenty-first century. The age of literary theory paved way for what has been generally termed as “post-theory age.” In the post-theory ages, as Timothy Morton argues, “Humans keep trying to distinguish rigorously between the living and the machinic.” This liberal humanist distinction between human and non-human appears to be untenable, for “life as such is a machinic, algorithmic functioning” and those categories which we signify as “life” and “consciousness” are to be understood as machinic affects. The existing critical paradigms fail to make sense when scenarios of revolutionary magnitude, of the kind mentioned above, emerge. The proposed book intends to provide a spectrum of informed introductions to emergent “thinking tools” so as to facilitate