At the outset of the twenty-first century, we seem at last positioned to recognize and admit the demise of literary theory as a distinct discipline of scholarship. Even the most dedicated proponents of theory are busy spelling out the dimensions of its irremediable crisis. 1 In retrospect, one can locate literary theory within a period of some eighty years, from its inception in the late 1910s until perhaps the early 1990s. The beginnings of the discipline were marked by the activities of the Russian Formalists. Wolfgang Iser’s turn in the late 1980s from reception theory and phenomenology of reading to what he called “literary anthropology” presaged the end of literary theory per se, and the death of Yuri Lotman in 1993 confirmed it. Lotman had in any case come gradually to embrace semiotics as a global theory of culture rather than a narrowly conceived theory of literature. 2