Objective
This project seeks to study the role, uses and transformations of the body within the contemporary reflection on post-Theory. It builds on contemporary work on post-Theory and on body-related issues in Anglo-American academic context, and it opens up to the French post-Theory movement, the German Kulturwissenschaft, philosophical life-narratives, body-oriented art discourses, and theoretical reflection on the senses. The project examines the body as a perpetually re-theorized political entity, as a common denominator of different types of literary and cultural criticism, and as a way of overcoming the divide not only among academic discourses, artistic practices and textual genres, but also between different intellectual traditions. The issues the project investigates range among the following: How is the body construed in the current post-theoretical phase of the humanities? Is reflection on the body a strategy shared by different post-theories? What does post-Theory gain or lose through its preoccupation with the body? To what extent does the body facilitate post-Theory’s mingling with explicitly political issues? Is this a convenient way to interdisciplinarity? How does the theorized body relate to the biological body and its senses? And in what ways is it reminiscent of its continued remodeling through art? In order to grapple with such issues, the project reads across a number of corpora: fundamental theoretical texts, as well as the vulgate of body studies, Readers, Histories and Introductions to Cultural Studies; texts “parasitic” to artworks’; philosophical life-narratives; seminal texts about the senses from the philosophy and the hard sciences. The analysis is based on systematic close readings, as well as on combined approaches and contextualized interpretations in an interdisciplinary and meta-theoretical perspective. It aims to address the specificity of each corpus, historicize it, and propose a narrative of the post-Theory moment of the body.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IOF
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Funding Scheme
MC-IOF - International Outgoing Fellowships (IOF)Coordinator
1678 Nicosia
Cyprus