Theory in the “Post” Era
Theory in the “Post” Era

Summary/Abstract: This book review symposium on the volume Theory in the “Post” Era (Alexandru Matei, Christian Moraru, Andrei Terian eds, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) sets out to assess the gains and limitations of the editors’ proposal to make world theory “from the periphery”. In it, Valeriu P. Stancu discusses the “Aesthetics” section of the volume, highlighting the bold suggestion to use “constructalism” as a philosophical framework for materialistically-minded world literature studies, the shrewd employment of aesthetics as a form of ontological “diplomacy”, the practice of criticism as communality, the anarchetype as a correction to the “aesthetics of centrality”, the plea for an ethical narratology and the use of metapolitics in the Romanian contemporary novel. Arleen Ionescu focuses on the discussion of temporalities, central to a volume preoccupied with the time of “post”, that is with exploring the chronological predicament of coming after postmodernism. She reviews the drive to synchronize characteristic of peripheric cultures such as Romania, the proposal of post-presentism as a way of coming to terms with 20th century’s cultural anxieties in relation to time, the tensions (political, psychological, ethical) that emerge from conjuring futurity, the East-Central European considerable contribution to a literature of post-memory, and the play with narrating the self in Romanian critifiction, “mistifiction”, and autofiction. Romanița Constantinescu examines the “critical modes” driven by the material and intellectual challenges of the “post” era, assessing the importance of a politically-minded geocriticism, the imperative of practicing digicriticism after the expansion of the internet, the hardships of the postcanonical age, the merit of promoting neocritique as a way of overcoming the limitations of classical cultural critique, and the perspective of a “somatic turn” in literary studies. Finally, Daiana Gârdan discusses the proposal of post-millennial world theory as a more scientifically-driven work and collaborative practice on a global scale, as well as the emphasis on “communality” expressed by the group of authors gathered in the pages of this volume.

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