Dr. Walid Qassab

Literary, intellectual, and philosophical theories are accelerating at an unprecedented rate, making it difficult for any reader to keep up. These critical approaches are often revolutionary, based on demolishing what preceded them. They claim to be scientific and based on philosophical foundations, which leads them to try to generalize their ideas. This generalization means negating the ideas of others.

These modern and postmodern trends, which are like "fads" or "crazes," present themselves as theories or philosophies: Structuralism, Deconstruction, Reception Theory, Semiotics, etc. For something to be called a theory, it must be based on objective scientific foundations and have the capacity for comprehensiveness and generalization. However, we often find the opposite. For example, Structuralism claims that a text is only language, negating the author, history, and culture. Then came Deconstruction, claiming that the text does not even exist without the reader. Have theories become so trivialized that every extreme idea is called a theory? Modern critical approaches in Western thought are, as Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad said, like waves that cancel each other out, more like fashion than schools of thought.