The primary aim of this Theories and Methodologies special feature (PMLA, March 2024) is to spotlight work on 'the Persianate' in the disciplines of language and literature. The essayists examine the aesthetic, cultural, linguistic, political, religious, economic, and social currents that both construct the Persianate world and compromise it at key moments not just in history but also in certain analytic contexts.

The eight essays that appear in the Theories and Methodologies section of the January 2024 issue of PMLA examine core concepts derived from the premodern compendium of Arabic thought—associated with the disciplines of aesthetics, jurisprudence, philosophy, rhetoric, theology, and more—and activate them as nodes of theoretical contemplation.

Nineteenth-century concepts of kinaesthesia influenced the evolution of Edmund Husserl's work, truly transforming the discipline of philosophy and setting an agenda for poststructuralism. In this piece, Noland argues that a sense category central to dance impacted what we now call "critical theory," as though the dancing body ghosted a discourse that has typically ignored it.

“What does knowledge do?” exposes our impoverished vocabulary for discussing how what appears political inside of a particular interpretation generates political change in the broader world. What if we took these expressions literally? What if discourse is a thing whose unfoldings we can modulate both through its meanings and through its materiality? Answering these questions requires a more strenuous examination of what we mean by the material, of how meaning matters. 

Sarah Tindal Kareem does not think that the English language possesses a good vocabulary for talking about the pleasures of readerly discomfort and difficulty: the feeling that one part of ourselves leaps ahead while another part lags behind. She finds that the reading experiences she most relishes are the ones in which agency is at once exercised and abdicated.

Any genealogy of the postcritical undertaken in 2015 should map not just the personal experiences and dispositional idiosyncrasies that have led us to our current procedures as individual readers and thinkers. It should also plot those individual stories within a larger institutional narrative of critical activity in the American academy.

One doesn’t need a metaphysics of history to sense when a form of life with its attendant rituals, pieties, and practices has grown old. Theory’s reign in literature departments has long been past the point when its claims arrived with salutary shock in the profession.