Reframing Critical, Literary, and Cultural Theories. Thought on the Edge

This book, edited by Nicoletta Pireddu, and with contributors from diverse cultural and scholarly backgrounds and based in three different continents, participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged “death of theory”, proposing new areas of investigation and interpretive possibilities, reopening dialogues with past and present discourses from a plurality of perspectives and locations. By acknowledging the spatio-temporal and cultural delimitations of any intellectual practice, the book creates awareness of its own partiality and incompleteness, but treats boundaries as zones of contact, exchange, and conceptual mobility that promote crossings and connections.

Pireddu’s introduction, “Recoding the Past, Re-situating the ‘Post-‘”, addresses ways in which the situatedness and multiplicity of discourses can help transcend paths of cultural hegemony, delineating a theoretical and critical landscape where crossfertilizations of ideas occur across both space and time. It thus provides a framework for the scope of the book, namely, to promote continuing dialog about literary, cultural, and critical theories beyond normative positions and with the awareness of the contextual nature of our production of knowledge.