The past decade has seen a growing consensus across the humanities that the high tide of influence for radical literary and cultural theory has passed. Although none of the various strands of postmodern discourse have been refuted per se, there has been a general feeling of theoretical ennui circling through the profession, a zeitgeist which has been given institutional recognition by books such as Theory’s Empire and After Theory, and special issues of leading journals such as Critical Inquiry. Irreducible to simple discursive exhaustion or voguish hunts for the “postpostmodern,” the waning enthusiasm for doctrinaire theory seems in part a consequence of the success of the theoretical canon in dismantling all that is dismantlable.

This issue of National Central University Journal of Humanities, ““Inter” “After” “Theory”,” seeks to ask how the end of theory might relate to interdepartmental, interdisciplinary, and intercultural modes of research. What is the state of boundary-crossing now that boundary-crossing has become institutionalized, routine, and simply dull? Are the boundaries to be forgotten, ignored, redrawn, or something else? Questions may include, but are not limited to: cross-cultural research and postcolonial dispassion, “gender trouble” in the age of theory trouble, the creation and dissolution of “post”-periods, interdepartmental programs and the merging of theoretical discourses, delayed waxing and waning of theory across departmental or national boundaries, “New Media” and new modes, and so on.