The essays included in this volume are critical interventions in the ongoing debate on the notion of modernity and its impact on various academic disciplines. The issues they address have wide-ranging implications for both theory and praxis in the areas of, for instance, democracy, literary education, painting and architecture, generative linguistics, ethnic discourse, colonial and postcolonial literature, regimes of science, and historicism. Each contributor to this volume tries to bring a fresh perspective on this notion in relation to the discipline he or she belongs to. By placing these perspectives together the editors have tried to encourage a cross-disciplinary dialogue on the problematic of modernity which has assumed a greater saliency with the passing of the twentieth century and the onset of the new century.

Sudha P. Pandya is Professor of English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. She received her Ph. D. from Benaras Hindu University in 1979 and has been teaching since 1980. She has been on Fellowships to Canada on Shastri Indo-Canadian institute programs. She has published papers on literary theory and criticism and new literatures. Her research interests include diasporic writing and translation studies.

Prafulla C. Kar is Professor of English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah, USA in 1973. A former Deputy Director and Academic Associate at the American Studies Research Center, Hyderabad (now Indo-American Center for International Studies) he was the recipient of both pre-doctoral and post-doctoral Fulbright Fellowships to study in the United States. He is an editor of the Journal of Contemporary Thought and a convenor of the Forum on Contemporary Theory at Baroda. He has published several books and papers on American literature, literary theory, Indian English literature and cultural studies.

Contributors : Fred Dallmayr, Kalidas Misra, Parul Dave Mukherji, Madhavi Desai, Anahite Contractor, Pramod Kumar Pandey, Mohan Ramanan, E.V.Ramakrishnan, Pramod K.Nayar, M.Sridhar, Udaya Kumar, Nimmi Rangaswamy, Leigh Dale and Kaushik Sunder Rajan.