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2 books match the query 'Critical Turn'

cover of Cervantine Futures: Reading Cervantes after the Critical Turn

Cervantine Futures

Reading Cervantes after the Critical Turn

Edited by Nicholas R. Jones and Paul Michael Johnson

Vanderbilt University Press, 2026

Cervantine Futures places the writings of Miguel de Cervantes into conversation with some of the most pressing issues in cultural studies, critical theory, and sociopolitical discourse of the last decade. Assembling a diverse range of prominent and emerging scholars in the field, this volume stakes a claim for Hispanism’s place in the growing scholarly movement to vindicate pre- and early modernity for its incisive and often singular perspective on race, gender, ability, the body, affect, materialism, and other axes of timely debate.

To date, the writings of Miguel de Cervantes have been oddly sidelined from larger, ongoing scholarly projects to link premodern literature with the most recent analytics of critical theory and cultural studies. Cervantine Futures addresses this conspicuous gap by highlighting creative, forward-looking, and rigorous approaches that situate Cervantes in recent theoretical developments in critical cultural studies. Conceived under the rubric of “futures”—collective and capacious, yet also subjunctive and transtemporal—this book tasks the fields of early modern Iberian and Cervantine studies with adopting a more global approach to the early modern period that surveys the current and historical landscapes while charting new horizons. Crucially, Cervantine Futures reflects upon how early modern texts, cultural modes of expression, and visual ideations from Cervantes’s life and legacy resonate with contemporary debates on gender, race, ability, and other issues. The volume thus includes scholarly provocations that deploy feminist, queer, critical race, disability studies, and new materialist approaches to Cervantes’s oeuvre—tendentiously positioned as “canonical”—with the purpose not only of scrutinizing its sociopolitical meanings, but also of creating new archives that productively reframe and rethink early modernity.

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cover of The Critical Turn: Rhetoric and Philosophy in Postmodern Discourse

The Critical Turn

Rhetoric and Philosophy in Postmodern Discourse

Edited by Ian Angus and Lenore Langsdorf

Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

Concerned with criticizing representational theories of knowledge by developing alternative concepts of knowing and communicating, Ian Angus and Lenore Langsdorf bring together eight essays that are united by a common theme: the convergence of philosophy and rhetoric.

In the first chapter, Angus and Langsdorf illustrate the centrality of critical reasoning to the nature of questioning itself, arguing that human inquiry has entered a "new situation" where "the convictions and orientations that have traditionally marked the separation of rhetoric and philosophy—the concern for truth and the focus on persuasion—have begun to converge on a new space that can be defined through the central term discourse."In these essays, this convergence of rhetoric and philosophy is addressed as it presents itself to a variety of interests that transcend the traditional boundaries of these fields.

The two editors, Raymie E. McKerrow, Michael J. Hyde and Craig R. Smith, James W. Hikins and Kenneth S. Zagacki, Calvin O. Schrag and David James Miller, and Richard L. Lanigan map this new space, recognizing that such mapping "simultaneously constitutes the territory mapped."

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