Although the posthumanist tag is applied to the society where men and machines compete for power, the mutation earning this name was the one that affected the perception of man’s identity through the collapse of ontological categories. Human nature changed as the historical self was replaced by deconstructionists with the instance saying “I”, man’s cognition was redefined as biological epistemology by Maturana and Varela (1972), quantum physics relegated relations of causation to invisible and unpredictable process at the subatomic level, phases of civilization made room for temporary plateaus generated by signifying particles within the eternal flow of things and energy Deleuze and Guattari (1980). What used to be perceived as reality has become an amorphous mixture of elements, in which bodies are no longer discrete entites but processes, emerging forms of life. If the Deleuzian “becoming animal” of 1980 stirred anxiety around the human body made into a site of various inscriptions and identities, The Shape of Water (2018), a novel written by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus, the homonymous movie (2017) directed by the former, or Robert Bolesto’s screenplay of the Polish movie The Lure (2015) have recently provided the companion pieces of elementary nature “becoming human” across the human/ animal divide The quantum picture of a world reduced to a flux of matter and energy in A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had somehow prepared the ground for this posthuman reversal of the Renaissance worldpicture with man at the top of creation. The process, however, had already started some decades before. We are moving back in time locating its origin in the rise of object-oriented philosophy.

The revision of Romanticism in the last two or three decades went deeper than any other revolution in the canonization of western literature. Tom Wein (British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms and the Gothic Novel.1764-1824), Gary Kelly (English Fiction of the Romantic Period), Virgil Nemoianu (Taming Romanticism), or Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre (Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity) demystified the uncritical association of this literary trend with the revolutionary political ethos in 1789 France, casting light on the conservative, pastoriented yearnings of the major representatives. Such considerations, however, do not apply to the American scene, where politics and poetics, unaffected, or at least not directly affected by the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic wars remained faithful to the ideas of the French Revolution. Whereas Europe turned conservative, with the Great Powers forming suprastatal networks of influence (The Holy Alliance at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 bonding the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian and Russian empires, joined a few years later by France and the United Kingdom), America built a political system grounded in the rights of the individual and pursued ” dreams” of personal and national assertiveness (the ”city on the hill,” “from rags to riches”) in opposition to the European ”concert of nations” model. Our paper is pointing to a necessary dissociation of meliorist plots and narratives of healing in the romantic canon on either part of the Atlantic instead of subsuming them under a common poetics/politics heading.

Interdisciplinarity is "the ideal entry point into one of today's most heated critical debates" reads the back blurb of the book published by Joe Moran at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Routledge, 2002). How old was actually the "New Critical Idiom" in the philosophy of cultural representation is the question the present paper is trying to answer. We are travelling back in time to the point where aesthetics, poetics or art theory extended to include domains that Immanuel Kant had placed on the other side of the disciplinary divide: physics, algebra, geometry. The rise of a meta theory for disciplinary interfaces is related to the writings of Gaston Bachelard and Ernst Cassirer, who were sensitive to radical shifts in contemporary thought: the former responded to the rise of postformal thought (the logique du contradictoire, or polyvalent logic, informing the quantum superposition of states), while the latter took over from Felix Klein's invariant theory the model of a unified frame for symbolic representation which rendered possible correlations across disciplinary fields and the coming together of the multiple languages of mythology, religion, science and art.Keywords: Interdisciplinarity, the New Critical Idiom, cultural representation, disciplinary reconfiguration, postformal thought.Not less than four modal expressions of normativity were used by David Bartholomae, Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at the University of Pittsburgh, at the height of what had come to be called the "terror of theory" in the ninth decade of the last century:The students have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily and comfortably one with their audience, as though they were members of the academy, or historians or anthropologists or economists; they have to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language, finding some compromise between idiosyncracy, a personal history, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline. They must learn to speak our language (Bartholomae: web).From a high landing, the site of academic humanities looks nowadays like the famous "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes" in the dawns of modernity, the combatants being distributed along the frontline separating pro-theorists from anti-theorists. Looking backward at my own career as student, I come to two contradictory conclusions: on the one hand, that several authors who were then enshrined in the canon (Malcolm Lowry, Lawrence Durrell, Iris Murdoch, among others) enjoy little attention from professional critics nowadays, while others who were not studied at all

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Is space relevant in a debate over the ethical dimension of a literary work? If we understand it as Foucault[1], Lefebvre[2], Soja[3] or Marc Auger[4] do, it is. In Andre Norton’s The Crossroads of Time[5], many worlds coexist as versions of an original earth, ruined by wars whose memories set agents under cover travelling across in order to defend what had remained of humanity besieged by monsters against a universal murderer, Kmoat Vo Pranj. The characters’ psychic powers depend on their interference with the environment – an idea probably originating with quantum experiments whose results depend on the interference of the measuring equipment with the system. An agent talks about alternative histories in an ecological version which relates individuals’ growth or success to favourable conditions in the world out there, to their or society’s benefit