Reader's History Meets Textual Geography: Towards a Syncretistic Theory of Reading Arundhati Banerjee In the last few decades of the twentieth century, literary theory has undergone a marvelous revolution. It has generated a dis- course of contextualization, thus opening up boundaries between disciplines, yoking together questions of history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and opening up new disciplines as cul- and cultural studies. In the process, mainstream a shift from questions of aesthetics and textual monumentality to questions of how, why and wherefore one interrogates a text, and the results such queries bring forth. Most of these schools have taken as their driving principle the question of the reading subject's identity in order to interrogate a text. While this shift is one that has added complexity, imagination and rigor to the ways theorists suggest that we interpret texts, it has also tural criticism theory has made created a sharp divide with the more conservative schools that claim that the text in this discourse becomes merely a pretext for an interrogation that spans extra-literary literary ones. domains more often than Moreover, there is a growing feeling that post- modem criticism has exhausted its fundamental theoretical para- digms and is now doing nothing much more than testing more texts against these already established frameworks. The purpose of this paper is to discuss one way out of this impasse; a possibility of formulating a discourse where one can provide for what identity-based criticism has failed to do: provide a space where one could bring the focus back onto textual architec- ture in order to reconstruct a paradigm of reading where the essential question would still remain why and how a reader way she does. However this paradigm would ask if there is anything in the text that makes a reader read the way she does, while acknowledging the identity-determined expecta- interprets a text the tions of the reader. Posing the above question would generate a reading model where one would provide a language for the process by which a text and a reader collude with each other in order to produce the meaning of the text. Put more simply, this that is symbiotic,