Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Introduction: Recoding the Past, Reinventing the Post; Nicoletta PiredduPart I. Meta-theoretical Premises1. Critiquing the Critique, Ming Xie2. The Scope of Literary Theory; Patrick Colm Hogan3. In Defense of an Unstable Literature, S bastien DoubinskyPart II. Theoretical Approaches to Literature4. Illegitimacy as Norm: On the Temporal Structure of Science and Theory; Kirk Wetters5. On Aristocratic Reading: The Ordeal of Conversion; Peter Paik6. Reconstructing Religion and Literature; Vincent Pecora7. Transcreationl Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Roch rePart III. Critical and Cultural Theories8. Space, Mobility, and Materiality: Rethinking Notions of Geographic Coherence; Diana Sorensen9. Outsourcing Post-Colonialism; Rukmini Bhaya Nair10. Provincializing Posthumanism; Neda Atanasoki11. Experimental Cosmopolitanism; Didier CosteCoda12. Critical Pedagogy: Practical Occidentalism in the Classroom; Robert Cowan
Synopsis
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 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.