‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

Preface Introduction: The Role of the Reader I. Open 1. The Poetics of the Open Work 2. The Semantics of Metaphor 3. On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language II. Closed 4. The Myth of Superman 5. Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris 6. Narrative Structures in Fleming III. Open/Closed 7. Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs 8. Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Bibliography

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

This essay reflects on recent debates around planetary urbanization, many of which have been articulated through dismissive caricatures of the core epistemological orientations, conceptual proposal...

Debating planetary urbanization: For an engaged pluralism:

In this article, I will describe the methodology of transdisciplinarity. My analysis will be divided in several parts: what means “beyond disciplines”; the distinction between multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, indisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity; the definition of disciplinary boundaries; the axioms of the methodology of transdisciplinarity: the notion of “levels of Reality”; the logic of included middle; and the universal interdependence. I will conclude by asserting that we are at the threshold of a New Renaissance.

Methodology of Transdisciplinarity

Reflection on practice through the medium of creative writing offers a narrative mode challenging instrumental approaches to reflection as logico-scientific knowing. However, such creative writing may be dominated by a discourse of personalistic humanism and the personal-confessional genre, with attendant internal contradictions, such as unreflexive accounts of personal 'discovery' and 'growth'. A counterargument is offered drawing on social constructivism. Subjectivities supposedly revealed by personal-confessional modes of writing may be constructed by the genre, as confessional practices producing confessors. Alternative paths to writing critically reflexive praxis are suggested; and aesthetic, erotic and ethical issues arising out of a critique of personal-confessional writing are discussed. Writing is seen as homage to language itself, where language offers the very ambiguity, uniqueness and value conflict that Donald Schon characterises as the 'indeterminate zones of practice' that we must inhabit e...

Writing With Invisible Ink: Narrative, confessionalism and reflective practice

A groundbreaking essay collection that pursues the rise of geoculture as an essential framework for arts criticism, The Planetary Turn shows how the planet—as a territory, a sociopolitical arena, a natural space of interaction for all earthly life, and an artistic theme—is increasingly the conceptual and political dimension in which twentyfirst-century writers and artists picture themselves and their work. In an introduction that comprehensively defines the planetary model of art, culture, and culturalaesthetic interpretation, the editors explain how the living planet is emerging as distinct from older concepts of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and environmentalism and is becoming a new ground for exciting work in contemporary literature, visual and media arts, and the social humanities. Written by internationally recognized scholars, the twelve essays illustrate the unfolding of a new vision of potential planetary community that retools earlier models based on the nation-state or political “blocs” and reimagines cultural, political, aesthetic, and ethical relationships for the post–Cold War era.

The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century

A sweeping inquiry into post-Cold War American literature and theory, Cosmodernism argues, cautiously but persuasively, for the rise of a new cultural paradigm against the backdrop of accelerating globalisation. Moraru calls this paradigm ""cosmodern."" He uses the term to account for what seems to be gradually challenging the postmodern over the last twenty-odd years. Not so much a well-structured movement yet, cosmodernism is chiefly a critical construct enabling Moraru to articulate representative literary-theoretical interventions of the past two decades into a reasonably coherent model. The coherence inheres, he shows, in a certain ""relational"" imaginary, which the critic canvasses by placing a wide range of authors and works in, across, and against the material-conceptual networks of globalisation, cosmopolitanism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and other areas of contemporary U.S. intellectual history.

Christian Moraru

Papers

The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century

Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary

Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning

Introduction:: The Planetary Condition

Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology