To limit refers to restriction and control, to demarcation and circumscription. A limit can be a threshold or a ceiling, an end or a restraint. Limits are boundaries, borders, and frontiers, and they demarcate lands and cities, countries and continents; but also social, communal and class structures. We cannot conceive a world without limits, a society without restrictions, selves without edges. At the same time, we interpret limits as the opponents of freedom, endurance and expansion. Simultaneously places and non-places, limits mark the end and the beginning; they are fixed, but not quite; they are porous and changeable, permeable and impermeable. They can be challenged, destroyed, replaced. They are persistent, evoking inequality and exclusion as well as possibility and hope. They are fundamental to understand the world we live in.

This new research project is based on the hypothesis that our relationship to limits is currently changing in the geopolitical, socio-cultural, ideological and ethical acceptations of the term, and that close examination of such concept is essential to apprehend the transmodern definition of the subject and our relation to the world we inhabit. In fact, we start from the premise, supported by our work on Transmodernity–as shown in our previous projects “Palimpsestic Knowledge: Inquiries into a Transmodern Literary Paradigm” (FFI2015-65775-P) and “Literature in the Transmodern Era: Celebration, Limits and Transgression” (FFI2017-84258-P)–that this dominant socio-cultural paradigm is currently entering a new phase, prompted by the accelerated climate crisis, ever-increasing migratory flows, the COVID-19 pandemic, the widespread presence of armed conflict, and other systemic risks that coexist with structural and other forms of insidious trauma caused by sexism, racism, xenophobia, aporophobia and the long-lasting effects of colonialism. Hence, with the conviction–supported by decades of research under the auspices of the Contemporary Narrative in English research group based at the University of Zaragoza–that artistic forms in general and literary texts in particular provide an invaluable source of affective knowledge about the most relevant and urgent socio-cultural changes, this project intends to explore how contemporary writing in English manifests the multifarious tensions and possibilities inherent in the concept of the limit, understood as boundary; as exclusion (thus the ‘off-limits’ reference); as porous membrane and relational network; and as an unchartered formal and generic literary territory. We thus aim to further our investigation on how present-day writing in English both reflects and contributes to conforming recent developments in the transmodern paradigm.