In his new book, Christian Moraru argues that post-Cold War culture in general and, in particular, the literature, philosophy, and theory produced since 9/11 foreground an emergent “planetary” imaginary—a “planetarism”—binding in unprecedented ways the world's peoples, traditions, and aesthetic practices. This imaginary, Moraru further contends, speaks to a world condition (“planetarity”) increasingly exhibited by human expression worldwide. Grappling with the symptoms of planetarity in the arts and the human sciences, the author insists, is a major challenge for today's scholars—a challenge, Reading for the Planetmeans to address. Thus, Moraru takes decisive steps toward a critical methodology—a “geomethodology”—for dealing with planetarism's aesthetic and philosophical projections. Here, Moraru analyzes novels by Joseph O'Neill, Mircea Cartarescu, Sorj Chalandon, Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, and Dai Sijie, among others, as demonstration of his paradigm.
“Reading for the Planet is an intense, state-of-the-art update on the intrusion of planetary tropes and overall thinking into contemporary thought. It is the critical equivalent, although at the highest level of theoretical oversight, of a progress report—one whose relevance is sustainable at least over the next decade. It is written by a mind as unflagging in its rigor as it is tuned into a vast range of cultural artifacts and theoretical contributions.”
—Henry Sussman, Yale University
“The fact that Chris Marker began his career by launching a book series called ‘Little Planet' suffices to substantiate Christian Moraru's thesis: if we want to go beyond the quarrels opposing world literature and globalization, we must invest the planet with a new sense of urbanity and move between strategic sites (Ca?rta?rescu's Bucharest, Ugre?ic''s Amsterdam, Houellebecq's Paris, Pamuk's Kars, Chalandon's Beirut, Hamid's Lahore, Mukherjee's Gauripur, to name but a few, since, like Marker, Moraru has read everything) so as to define a planetary ethics beyond the ethnic. This remarkable critical synthesis offers both the rationale of an original ‘geomethodology' and a wake-up call for the future humanities.”
—Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania
“Christian Moraru's new book will establish him as the leading scholar of planetarity, a mode of discourse that has emerged as a new cosmopolitan paradigm. He argues persuasively that his planetary reading model will promote, in the cultural sphere, the creation of genuine critical relationality and a truly human ecosystem.”
—John Pizer, Louisiana State University
