Prof. Babar Jamil

Introduction: Existentialism as a Theory of Crisis Existentialism occupies a singular position in the history of modern literary theory. It is neither fully humanist nor fully poststructuralist, neither committed to metaphysical foundations nor ready to abandon meaning altogether. Instead, existentialism emerges at a historical and intellectual threshold: the moment when essence, morality, and narrative coherence […]

Introduction: Why Narratology Must Be Rethought Narratology has often been described as the most “scientific” branch of literary theory. Emerging from structuralism, it promises a systematic account of narrative by identifying its underlying structures, recurrent functions, and formal laws. Plot, character, time, voice, and perspective are analyzed as if they were neutral components of a

Introduction: From the Question of Woman to the Question of Identity Gender and queer theory enter modern literary theory not as an extension of feminism but as a profound displacement of its foundational problem. Where feminist literary theory, particularly in its second-wave articulation, is organized around the destabilizing question “What is a woman?”, gender and

Introduction: Feminism as a Crisis of Definition Feminist literary theory emerges not merely as a movement for rights, representation, or revisionary reading, but as one of the most profound intellectual crises within modern literary theory. At its core lies a deceptively simple yet philosophically destabilizing question: What is a woman? Unlike Marxism, which presupposes class

Stylistics has long occupied a marginal yet persistent position in literary studies. Frequently presented as an auxiliary discipline—an applied linguistics that offers technical tools for textual analysis—it is often contrasted with “theory proper,” which is assumed to deal with ideology, subjectivity, history, and power at a higher conceptual level. This division is misleading. It rests

By the time Reader-Response Theory emerges in the mid-twentieth century, the Enlightenment foundations of literary meaning have already been profoundly unsettled. Marxism has displaced meaning from individual consciousness to material and ideological structures; psychoanalysis has fractured the subject internally through the logic of the unconscious; postcolonial theory has exposed the universal human subject as a

The emergence of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincides with a broader intellectual rupture in Western thought. Alongside Marxism, psychoanalysis constitutes one of the most sustained critiques of the Enlightenment conception of the human subject. Enlightenment humanism imagined the subject as rational, unified, self-present, and capable of transparent self-knowledge. Reason and

1. Introduction Modern literary theory can be read as a prolonged dismantling of the belief that literature expresses a timeless, universal human essence. What once appeared as the self-evident truth of “great literature”—that it speaks across cultures, histories, and societies—gradually becomes suspect under theoretical scrutiny. From Marxism onward, theory repeatedly exposes the mechanisms through which

Introduction: New Historicism as a Neo-Marxist Transformation New Historicism did not emerge in a theoretical vacuum, nor was it a sudden poststructuralist rupture with Marxism. On the contrary, its conceptual DNA is deeply marked by neo-Marxist revisions of classical Marxist thought—particularly those associated with Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. What New Historicism ultimately abandons is

Introduction Post-structuralism emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century as a critical response to structuralism, challenging its assumptions, methodologies, and claims about the universality and determinacy of structures. While structuralism, inspired by Saussure, posited that meaning arises from fixed relations within a system of differences, post-structuralist thought questioned whether such systems could ever