Theory in the "Post" Era

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.

Alexandru Matei is Professor of French at Transilvania University of Bra?ov, 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 Literature’s 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 intérieure (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).