The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn
The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of the social, the imaginary is ideally suited to chart the consequences of the transnational turn in American studies. Leading scholars in the field from the United States and Europe address the literary, social, and political dimensions of the imaginary, providing a methodological and theoretical groundwork for American studies scholarship in the transnational era and opening new arenas for conceptualizing formations of imaginary belonging and subjectivity. This important state-of-the-field collection will appeal to a broad constituency of humanists working to overcome methodological nationalism.
About the Author
Ramón Saldívar, professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2012. He is Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Studies, and has served as Chair of the Department of English and the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Currently the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program at Stanford, he has also served as the Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. His teaching and research focus on the areas of literary criticism and literary theory, the history of the novel, 19th and early 20th century literary studies, cultural studies, globalization and issues concerning transnationalism, and Chicano and Chicana studies. In March 2013 President Obama appointed him to a six -year term on the National Council on the Humanities.
Professor Saldívar has served on the editorial boards of Stanford University Press and the scholarly journals, American Literary History, American Literature, Aztlán, andModern Fiction Studies. His articles have appeared in PMLA, American Literary History,Narrative, Modern Language Notes (MLN), English Literary History (ELH), Comparative Literature, Diacritics, Studies in the Novel, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, and other major journals. He is author of Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (1984), a study of the authority of meaning in the novel, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), a history of the development of Chicano narrative forms, and The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2006), which was awarded the MLA prize for best book in the area of Chicano/Chicana and Latino/Latina Cultural and Literary Studies. His new book, The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn, co-edited with Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz, will appear in Spring 2013 from the University Press of New England. He is currently at work on two new book projects, Race, Narrative Theory and Contemporary American Fiction and Américo Paredes and the Post-war Writings from Asia.
Professor Saldívar is a recipient of the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education and the Lillian and Thomas B. Rhodes Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He served as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University from 1994-99.