Reading for the Planet

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 imaginarya planetarismbinding in unprecedented ways the worlds 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 todays scholarsa challenge, Reading for the Planet means to address. Thus, Moraru takes decisive steps toward a critical methodologya geomethodologyfor dealing with planetarisms aesthetic and philosophical projections. Here, Moraru analyzes novels by Joseph ONeill, Mircea Cartarescu, Sorj Chalandon, Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, and Dai Sijie, among others, as demonstration of his paradigm.