Overview

Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reorientation that has refocused entire fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and its sister terms such as globe, planet, and earth. The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what “world” means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study. The contributors raise questions such as: What happens when “world” is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific inquiry? How exactly does “worlding” bear on the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the theory or theoretical model that allows “world” to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge domain? With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.

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9781501380921

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Reviews

Written in conscious opposition to the priorities sustained by neoliberal globalism, the essays in The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory envision how a 'worlding' of academic fields as well as other discourses and professions can truly democratize and decolonize the domains of work, the arts, and education throughout the planet. These essays propose models rooted in both interdisciplinarity and individuality that can effectively resist the homogenization and top-down models universally dominant since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. --John Pizer, Professor of German, Louisiana State University, USA, and author of The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice By now, the world has been approached from almost every angle. As long as one is not satisfied with easy universalism, this goal is already difficult to achieve at a discipline level. Yet, Di Leo, Moraru and their many contributors go far beyond that. They end up interweaving all of the specific readings to help us better understand what is really meant by worlding. The effort is immense; the result is extraordinary. --Bertrand Westphal, Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Universite de Limoges, France, and author of The Plausible World No better proof can be imagined that theory is alive and well than this visionary collection, which takes on the mystery of how thinking has changed, and will have to change further, in response to the challenge of the world scale. It treats what the world means not only to an extraordinary range of disciplines, ranging from the humanities to the natural sciences, but also in the professions and, perhaps most important, in zones of concern like sexuality and visual culture that are still seeking their optimum academic organization. The word inter-disciplinary is grossly inadequate to describe the intellectual ambition of this volume. Massive as it is, it is still more ambitious than its size indicates. The only thing standing in the way of calling it a landmark is its irresistible freshness. --Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, USA, and author of The Beneficiary

Author Information

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria, USA. He is Editor of the American Book Review, Founding Editor of the journal symploke, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. His recent publications includeThe End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of Print (2019), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019), What’s Wrong with Antitheory? (Bloomsbury, 2020), Philosophy as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Vinyl Theory (2020). 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 include Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011), Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (2015), and Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018).

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