With the seemingly unshakeable ground of literature having suffered a number of nearfatal hemorrhages due to the changing mediascape and the temblors of 2008 and 2020 the author suggests for the future of literary studies Not Theory of Literature but Literature as Theory. Not literary studies as putting on offer familiarity with a series of privileged literary texts and their prized cultural meaning nor transmuting theory into one of those canonical texts but literary studies as a kind of theor