This book participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged “death of theory” and the current post-theoretical condition, arguing that the “finitude” of theoretical projects does not mean “end”, but rather contingency and...
moreThis book participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged “death of theory” and the current post-theoretical condition, arguing that the “finitude” of theoretical projects does not mean “end”, but rather contingency and transformation of thinking, beyond irreconcilable doctrines. Contributors from different cultural and scholarly backgrounds and based in three different continents propose new areas of investigation and interpretive possibilities, reopening dialogues with past and present discourses from a plurality of perspectives and locations. After a first section that reassesses the status and scopes of critique, theory, and literature, the book foregrounds new or neglected critical vocabulary, literary paradigms, and narrative patterns to reread texts at the intersection with other branches of the humanities—history, philosophy, religion, and pedagogy. It then explores geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological domains that have been historically and ideologically overdetermined (such as postsocialist, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan spaces), recodifying them as unstable sites of both conflicts and convergences. By acknowledging the spatio-temporal and cultural delimitations of any intellectual practice, the book creates awareness of our own partiality and incompleteness, but treats boundaries as zones of contact, exchange, and conceptual mobility that promote crossings and connections.
Table of Contents
Introduction: “Recoding the Past, Re-situating the “Post-” (Nicoletta Pireddu, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian, Georgetown University)
Part I Theoretical Indisciplinarities
"Meta-Critiquing: Critique, Hermeneutics, Theory," (Ming Xie, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)
"Illegitimacy as Norm: On the Temporal Structure of Science and Theory” (Kirk Wetters, Professor and Chair of Germanic Literature, Yale University)
“The Scope of Literary Theory" (Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor, Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, U of Connecticut)
“The Empirical Turn of Literary Studies” (Alexandre Gefen, Directeur de recherche, Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne nouvelle and CNRS)
"Unstable Literature" (Sébastien Doubinsky, novelist; Professor of French, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part II Unruly Rereadings
"Reading Aristocratically" (Peter Y. Paik, HK Research Professor of the Humanities at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea)
“The Function of Criticism in a ‘Post-Secular’ Age” (Vincent Pecora, Gordon B. Hinckley Presidential Endowed Chair in British Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City)
“Literary Ciceronianism and the Novel” (Sandra Gustafson, Professor of English and Political Sciences, University of Notre Dame)
“Taliban Poetry for Veterans. On Critical Pedagogy” (Robert Cowan, Acting Assistant Dean for Program Development, Assessment, & Review, Hunter College; Professor of English, The City University of New York).
Part III Critical Resettlements
“Space, Mobility and Materiality: Rethinking Notions of Geographic Coherence” (Diana Sorensen, Harvard University, Dean of Arts and Humanities, and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and of Comparative Literature)
“Postsocialism and the Afterlives of Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent” (Neda Atanasoki, Associate Professor, Department of Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz; Erin McElroy, Graduate Program in Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Outsourcing Post-colonialism” (Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Professor of Linguistics and English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; Senior Professorial Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies)
"Experimental Cosmopolitanism" (Didier Coste, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Université de Bordeaux Montaigne/ JNIAS-JNU, Delhi)
