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"Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 1946- author"
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Citizenship on Catfish Row
A radical reinterpretation of three controversial works that
illuminate racism and national identity in the United States
Citizenship on Catfish Row focuses on three seminal works in the
history of American culture: the first full-length narrative film,
D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation; the first integrated
musical, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Showboat; and the
first great American opera, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Each
of these works sought to make a statement about American identity
in the form of a narrative, and each included in that narrative a
prominent role for Black people.
Each work included jarring or discordant elements that pointed
to a deeper tension between the kind of stories Americans wish to
tell about themselves and the historical and social reality of
race. Although all three have been widely criticized, their efforts
to connect the concepts of nation and race are not only instructive
about the history of the American imagination but also provide
unexpected resources for contemporary reflection.
eBook
Language Alone
How did the concept of language come to dominate modern intellectual history? In Language Alone , Geoffrey Galt Harpham provides at once the most comprehensive survey and most telling critique of the pervasive role of language in modern thought. He shows how thinkers in such diverse fields as philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and literary theory have made progress by referring their most difficult theoretical problems to what they presumed were the facts of language. Through a provocative reassessment of major thinkers on the idea of language-Saussure, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Rorty, and Chomsky, among them-and detailed accounts of the discourses of ethics and ideology in particular, Harpham demonstrates a remarkable consensus among intellectuals of the past century and beyond that philosophical and other problems can best be understood as linguistic problems. And furthermore, that a science of language can therefore illuminate them. Conspicuously absent from this consensus, he shows, is any consideration of contemporary linguistics, or any awareness of the growing agreement among linguists that the nature of language as such cannot be known. Ultimately, Harpham argues, the thought of language has dominated modern intellectual history because of its singular capacity to serve as a proxy for a host of concerns, questions, and anxieties-our place in the order of things, our rights and obligations, our nature or essence-that resist a strictly rational formulation. Language Alone will interest literary critics, philosophers, and anyone with an interest in the uses of language in contemporary thought.
Geoffrey Galt Harpham is Professor of English at Tulane University. His many books include On the Grotesque, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics, One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad, and Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society.
eBook