Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Distinguished Professor of English and Philosophy at Texas A&M University-Victoria, USA. He is editor and founder of the critical theory journal symploke, editor-in-chief of American Book Review, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute.This book is a brilliant tribute to an underacknowledged feature of theory, the fact that in the very awkwardness of its abstractions, it has served as an international vocabulary, empowering critics around the world to challenge the unconscious cognitive authority of the native speaker. Ambitious and never dutiful, this volume also makes a contribution in its own right to elucidating the mysteries of a worldliness, actual as well potential, beyond global capitalism.
Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, USA, and author of Atrocity: A Literary History (2025)
Taking its cue from Goethe’s urge towards a <i>Weltliterature </i>and Derrida’s subsequent deconstructive account of worldliness, <i>Theory as World Literature</i> offers an insightful reflection of what both literature and theory, as well as theory <i>as</i> literature and literature <i>as </i>theory, become in the contemporary context of ‘worlding’ our literary and scholarly practices. Through a wide array of critical essays ranging from post-colonial studies to psychoanalytical readings, from realism to phenomenology, Jeffrey R. Di Leo’s edited volume is a thought-provoking collection that will no doubt open new windows on and cut fresh pathways through theory and literature in an increasingly global and increasingly fragile environment.
Stéphane Vanderhaeghe, Associate Professor, University Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis, France
<i>Theory as World Literature</i> provides a comprehensive (though not exhaustive) account of ‘world’ and ‘wordliness’ as approached from a plethora of theoretical fields, each with its own unique understanding of a process of ‘worlding’ literature.
Studia UBB Philologia
The first collection to consider what it means for theory to be considered as a species of world literature – and vice versa.
What does it mean for theory to be considered as a species of not just literature but world literature? This volume offers a wide range of accounts of how the “worlding” of literature both problematizes the national categorizing of theory (e.g., French theory), and brings new meanings and challenges to the coming together of theory and literature. In sum, it presents theory as world literature as a viable alternative to more commonplace approaches to theory.
Under such an approach to theory, what it means to be an African, American, or Asian “theorist” – let alone a French, German, or Spanish one – in the new millennium is as complicated (or simple) as what means to be “African,” “American,” or “Asian.” “Worlded” literature is not considered here as only the world literature of nations and nationalities. Rather, it is also the worlded literature of individuals crossing borders, mixing stories, and speaking in dialect. So too is it the worlded literature of the multinational corporate publishing industry wherein success in the global market is a major determinate of aesthetic and literary value.
Offering accounts of what it means to consider theory as world literature, the authors in this pioneering collection explore the ways in which we might regard theory as connected and reconnected through global literary networks of increasing complexity and precarity. By approaching theory from this perspective, Theory as World Literature demonstrates how and why theory is more worldly now than ever.
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Theory as World Literature: An Introduction
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, University of Houston-Victoria, USA
Part 1. Indigeneity, Decoloniality, and Race
1. Destructive Writing and Ending the World
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University, USA
2. Archipelagic Thought as World Literature: Glissant, Wynter, and Derrida’s Genres of the World
Mina Karavanta, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
3. Countering Encounters: Theorizing the Scale of Globality
Peter Hitchcock, CUNY Graduate Center, USA
4. Critical Race Theory: Counter-storytelling as Worlding
Nicole Simek, Whitman College, USA
Part 2. Semiotics and Psychoanalysis
5. Umberto Eco and the World Literature of Semiotics
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, University of Houston-Victoria, USA
6. Kristeva’s Semanalyse as World Literature: From Chora and Revolution to Abjection and Revolt
Paul Allen Miller, University of South Carolina, USA
7. Psychoanalysis as World Literature
Zahi Zalloua, Whitman College, USA
Part III. Realisms, Aesthetics, and Politics
8. From the Magically Real to the Really Real: When Latin American Literature Became World Theory
Sophia McClennen, Penn State University, USA
9. Approaches to Realism: A Few Global Test Cases
Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Connecticut, USA
10. Literature as a Global Theory
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Kyung Hee University, South Korea
11. Said’s Worldliness
H. Aram Veeser, CUNY Graduate Center, USA
Part IV. Phenomenology, Philology, and Plasticity
12. Levinas and World Literature
Donald R. Wehrs, Auburn University, USA
13. World Philology and World Theory
Alexander Beecroft, University of South Carolina, USA
14. Plastic, World, Literature
Ranjan Ghosh, University of North Benjal, India
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Literatures as World Literature welcomes new and creative reading methodologies for engaging with the category of world literature. The series acknowledges that the world as object of study has been defined in recent decades by a set of overarching environmental concerns, ongoing geo-political pressures, and realignments of both hard and soft-power dynamics that together dramatically shift our understanding of world literature as a literary category. With this in mind, the series attends to language, form, medium and theme in relation to literary texts and authors in their world-literary dimensions. The series recognizes that world literature grows out of creative and critical reading practices that empower and deepen our understanding of scholarly and educational approaches to a particular author, genre, art form, or theory in diverse ways.
We are interested in approaches that interrogate conceptions of the world within a range of literary considerations including aesthetic, geographical, and historical. It will also be important to discover the further reaches of this field in forms of largely oral storytelling still practiced today – often making use of emerging media platforms – with its roots traceable to pre-modernity. In short, we invite scholars and practitioners who are willing to move outward from their own areas of specialization to engage in critical inquiry that mobilizes the polyphonic, multiperspectival, multimedial term of world literature in order to discover something novel and expansive about their area of study.
To submit a proposal, please contact Amy.Martin@bloomsbury.com or the series editors: Thomas O. Beebee (tob@psu.edu) or Sofia Ahlberg (sofia.ahlberg@engelska.uu.se). For more information, see www.bloomsbury.com/discover/bloomsbury-academic/authors/submitting-a-book-proposal.