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

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Shortlisted for the AATSEEL 2022 Award for Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume (AATSEEL is The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) 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.

Reviews

Theory in the Post Era manages to assemble a heterogenous collection of interventions which capture the essential cultural gestures and ethical reflexes of an era that seems at once epistemologically insurgent and blas (173). In doing so, it lays the lexical groundwork for its envisioned projects of communal futurity. * Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory *
What Theory in the Post Era, as a collective manifesto for a new age, a post age of literary theory excels at is finding new and functional alternatives to an otherwise overused and exhausted set of working notion for the study of literary and critical phenomena in and from the margins and deliver them to the world. More than that, there are several concepts introduced for the very first time (at least in a similarly ambitious editorial project) that could feasibly form the basis for a new communality in Eastern European literary theory and that could rapidly enter the world theory system. * Philologica Jassyensia *
Even readers annoyed by the proliferation of constructions in post- will discover much to engage and provoke in this lively collection by a group of Romanian scholars. Writing from the periphery of Europe yet well-versed in contemporary Western critical thought, they offer original, estranging perspectives on issues of the moment, whether proposing an Easthetics, a Constructuralism, or literary criticism as diplomacy. * Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, Cornell University, USA *
Just as there is World Literature, this book urges us to consider World Theory. While we often tout the globalism of theory, its history typically focuses on Western Europe and the US. Reminding us that the story of theory is a travel narrative, this collection features work arising from Romanias Critical Theory Institute, whose members have been investigating the various possibilities of theory in the new millennium. One way to think of theory is as the genre that allows us to speak critically across various national, disciplinary, and temporal borders, and Theory in the Post Era works to create a contemporary intellectual commons. * Jeffrey Williams, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, and co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism *
This group of inspired Romanian 'post' theorists decisively shows two things. First, theory is no thing. You cannot be for or against it. It is rather the ubiquitous fabric of our global conversation on politics, culture, science, and art. Second, theory is no longer (and never really was) an elite discourse promulgated in Paris, New York, New Haven, and Irvine. It is a radically decentered interrogation that is elaborated in both Cluj and Greensboro, in Walla Walla and Taipei. It is alive and well and living on the periphery! * Paul Allen Miller, Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina, USA *
Boldly recasting theory as World Theory, this timely volume makes a compelling case for 'theory commons,' for what we as theorists translate and share as an open-ended, transnational community, a communityneeded by theory and in need of theoryinvested in thinking inventively and comparatively the plethora of posts endemic to our infinitely interconnected planetary condition. * Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Whitman College, USA *
Romania, amid the planetary turbulence of 2021, is every bit as a propos as the more customary deconstruction or Cultural Studies in denoting that interstitial zone (or lab) where new modalities of critical reception, theoretical investigation, and cultural mapping, prompted by turbulent developments, get generated. Romanian intellectuals have routinely coped with their countrys historical placement in a multicultural outskirts of European culture, with its World War II suppression under Nazism, followed by the singularly cruel abuses and meltdown of its Communist regime. It is no accident that we turn to an A-team of Romanian commentators assembled by the editors of Theory in the Post Era in our own efforts to process distortion effects now entrenched but particularly rampant since 2016, with no end in sight. In treating the periphery as a theoretical phenomenon on a planetary scale in its own right; in registering the inroads made by such factors as science, systems theory, cybernetics, design, geography, and diplomacy into contemporary cultural deliberation, the collective authorship of Theory in the Post Era casts luminous insight on present-day impasses, while crystallizing the vision necessary for addressing the future. * Henry Sussman, Professor Emeritus, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo, USA *

Author Bio

Alexandru Matei is Professor of French at Transilvania University of Braov, Romania, and Visiting Professor in the Anthropology Department of the Faculty of Sociology and Social Assistance of University of Bucharest, Romania. He is the author of books such as The Last Days of Literatures Life: Enormous and Insignificant in Contemporary French Literature (2008), A Captivating Tribune: Television, Ideology, and Society in Socialist Romania (2013), and Jean Echenoz et la Distance intrieure (2012). Christian Moraru is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. His recent publications are the monographs Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011) and Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (2015) and coedited essay collections such as The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (2015), Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Francophone Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020). Andrei Terian is Vice Rector of Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania, and Professor of Romanian literature at the same institution. His latest books are the monographs G. Calinescu: The Fifth Essence (2009) and Exporting Criticism: Theories, Contexts, Ideologies (2013). He is also a main contributor to the General Dictionary of Romanian Literature (first edition: 2004-2009; second edition: 2016-2021) and Chronology of Romanian Literary Life: 1944-1989 (2010-2021).