In order to fulfill the didactic assignment and talk about the future of literary theory, one might as well begin with the question of the present of literary theory: what is, what would or could be, “literary theory” today? If one can judge by the signs of the times, then the most direct answer to the question would be: “Not much.” Not much these days could qualify as “literary theory,” not much today is literary theory – at least in comparison to the fabled heyday of literary theory during the (late) 1960s and 1970s. In comparison to the various projects of poetics and the attempts at least to pose the question of “the literary” – whether as “literature” or “literary language,” “literariness” or “littérarité” or “literaturność,” whether coming out of revivals of Russian Formalism or the ambitions of literary semiology, for example, or the more hermeneutically oriented theories basing themselves on phenomenology and its prolongations or radicalizations – very little would seem to count as literary theory, literary theory proper, today. Indeed, literary theory in this sense would seem to be very much a thing of the past, and so much so that one is tempted to say: “If you want to talk about literary theory, you had better talk about ‘The Past of Literary Theory’ and forget about its future!” It is not that there is no “theory,” for “theory” is everywhere one looks today – as, say, “cultural theory” or “queer theory” or “critical theory” – but nowhere is it literary theory.