Abstract
The paper examines the complex way by which the need to develop a veritable model of reading and interpretation of a “text” (not just the so-called “literary” one, but all kinds of semantic production) has generated endless and unresolved arguments among literary theorists and critics, especially in the heyday of the abrupt death of the “Author-God”. The paper offers a deconstructive reading of Amu Djoleto’s “The Quest”. The central problematic of this paper is that the various theoretical logics of reading (or “repression”) such as, for instance, “disinterestedness” (Liberal Humanism),“depersonalization” (New Criticism), “defamiliarization” (Formalism), and “decenter” (Post-structuralism) have not eliminated, in actual sense, the intentionality or authorial sensibility from its central place, but instead they have generated illimitable “centers” within the marketplace of interpretation. The paper further demonstrates that the logics of these theoretical impulses (or conflicts of interpretation) are processes whereby a banished, denied, repressed, surpassed, buried element(s) of a theory returned through the side doors and back doors to claim its central place in a discourse; but such repression is never destroyed. The logic of repression, to be sure, is another name for language game (or “topological operation”), a situation whereby a theoretical model retains, keeps and incorporated the repressed elements of opposing theorems. The paper concludes that the problematic of theoretical impulse does not necessarily result to a zero-game or totalizing closure, but rather it opens up a theoretic space for the infinite crafty play of topological operations within the different interpretive discourses.
Keywords: theoretical impulse, topological and combinatory operations
DOI: www.doi.org/10.36349/sojolics.2025.v01i03.025
author/KẸ́HÌNDÉ Olúwabùkọ́lá, Ph.D
journal/Sokoto JOLICS 1(3) | December 2025 |
