Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons

Description

Theory in the “Post” Era brings together the work and perspectives of a group of Romanian theorists who discuss the morphings of contemporary theory in what the editors call the “post” era. Since the Cold War’s end and especially in the third millennium, theorists have been exploring the aftermath – and sometimes just the “after” – of whole paradigms, the crisis or “passing” of anthropocentrism, the twilight of an entire ontological and cultural “condition,” as well as the corresponding rise of an antagonist model, of an “anti,” “meta,” or “neo” alternative, with examples ranging from “posthumanism” and “post-postmodernism” to “post-aesthetics,” “postanalog” interpretation or “digicriticism,” “post-presentism,” “post-memory,” “post-” or “neo-critique,” and so forth. It is no coincidence, the contributors to this volume argue, that this “post” moment is also a time when theory is practiced as a world genre. If theory has always been a “worlded” enterprise, a quintessentially communal, cross-cultural and international project, this is truer at present than ever. Perhaps more than other humanist constituencies, today’s theorists work and belong in a theory commons that is transnational if still uneven economically, politically, and otherwise. Theory in the “Post” Era reports the results of Romanian theory experiments that join efforts made in other places to foster a theory for the “post” age. Cover Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward a “Post” Vocabulary—A Lab Report Part One Aesthetics 1 Constructalism: Literary Evolution as Multiscalar Design 2 Post-Aesthetics: Literature, Ontology, and Criticism as Diplomacy 3 Easthetics: The Ideological Shift in Narratology 4 Metapolitics: Recommitting Literature in the Populist Aftermath 5 Communality: Un-Disciplining Race, Class, and Sex in the Wake of Anti-“PC” Monomania 6 Anarchetype: Reading Aesthetic Form after “Structure” Part Two Temporalities 7 Post-Synchronism: “Cultural Complex,” or Critical Theory’s Unfinished Business 8 Post-Presentism: The Past, the Passed, and “Now” as Critical Operator 9 Postfuturism: Contemporaneity, Truth, and the End of World Literature 10 Post-Memory: The Labor of Critical Remembrance after Communism 11 Biofiction: Metamorphoses of Life-Writing across Criticism, Theory, and Literature Part Three Critical Modes 12 Geocritique: Siting, Poverty, and the Global Southeast 13 Neocritique: Sherlock Holmes Investigates Literature 14 Digicriticiam: Profession On(the)Line 15 Somatography: Writing as Incorporated Cognition, or The Body Knows More 16 Post-Canonicity: Curating World Literary Archives after Postmodernism Bibliography Contributors Index