“THE reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”, quipped Mark Twain when a newspaperman informed him about his obituary published in a newspaper. Of late, the rumours about the death of Urdu ...

In 1966, Roland Barthes published a short book—a pamphlet, really—called Criticism and Truth, in response to Raymond Picard, a distinguished professor and the biographer of the French classical ...

To understand some of the puzzling trends in recent American literature, it helps to have a basic knowledge of the so-called “post-structuralist” theory that took hold in U.S. English departments in ...

Works on the history of the discipline often refer to the period up to about the mid-1960s as Narratology's pre-structralist phase'. Furthermore, it is argued that this phase (and an even longer time ...