Synopsis 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 literatures, 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.