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The Shape of the Signifier
The Shape of the Signifieris a critique of recent theory--primarily literary but also cultural and political. Bringing together previously unconnected strands of Michaels's thought--from \"Against Theory\" toOur America--it anatomizes what's fundamentally at stake when we think of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and when we substitute the question of who people are for the question of what they believe.
With signature virtuosity, Michaels shows how the replacement of ideological difference (we believe different things) with identitarian difference (we speak different languages, we have different bodies and different histories) organizes the thinking of writers from Richard Rorty to Octavia Butler to Samuel Huntington to Kathy Acker. He then examines how this shift produces the narrative logic of texts ranging from Toni Morrison'sBelovedto Michael Hardt and Toni Negri'sEmpire. As with everything Michaels writes,The Shape of the Signifieris sure to leave controversy and debate in its wake.
eBook
Foucault and Literature
The writings of the French historian, literary critic and philosopher Michel Foucault have been of immense importance in the formation of the “new historicism” and “cultural materialism” which currently dominate international literary studies. Foucault’s accounts of power, sexuality and discourse have had a profound influence, and will remain central to future debates and developments.
Foucault and Literature provides a detailed introduction to the whole body of Foucault’s work, and assesses its impact on Anglo-American literary studies. Simon During offers a critique both of Foucault and of the literary studies that have been influenced by him. As such, his book will be of interest to all those involved in the study and teaching of literary criticism and theory, as well as those who have a particular interest in the work of Michel Foucault.
Simon During is Senior Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Melbourne, Australia.
eBook
Poetics and praxis 'after' objectivism
\"Poetics and Praxis 'After' Objectivism includes an introduction, ten chapters, and a roundtable afterward--all of which have been written specifically for this volume. The collection examines late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poetic praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to study this vital legacy through current poetic praxis, renewing the complexities of the past in terms of the difficulties of the present. The book's scope investigates the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time, examining and exemplifying generative intersections of creativity and critique\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
A Genealogy of Cyborgothic
In his provocative and timely study of posthumanism, Dongshin Yi adopts an imaginary/imaginative approach to exploring the transformative power of the cyborg, a strategy that introduces balance to the current discourses dominated by the practicalities of technoscience and the dictates of anthropocentrism. Proposing the term \"cyborgothic\" to characterize a new genre that may emerge from gothic literature and science fiction, Yi introduces mothering as an aesthetic and ethical practice that can enable a posthumanist relationship between human and non-human beings. Yi examines the cyborg's literary manifestations in novels, including The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, Dracula, Arrowsmith, and He, She and It, alongside philosophical and critical texts such as Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism and System of Logic, William James's essays on pragmatism, ethical treaties on otherness and things, feminist writings on motherhood, and recent studies of posthumanism. Arguing humans imagine the cyborg in ways that are seriously limited by fear of the unknown and current understandings of science and technology, Yi identifies in gothic literature a practice of the beautiful that extends the operation of sensibility, heightened by gothic manifestations or situations, to surrounding objects and people so that new feelings flow in and attenuate fear. In science fiction, which demonstrates how society has accommodated science, Yi locates ethical corrections to the anthropocentric trajectory that such accommodation has taken. Thus, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic imagines a new literary genre that helps envision a cyborg-friendly, non-anthropocentric posthuman society. Encoded with gothic literature's aesthetic embrace of fear and science fiction's ethical criticism of anthropocentrism, the cyborgothic retains the prospective nature of these genres and develops mothering as an aesthetico-ethical practice that both humans and cyborgs should perform.
Contents: Introduction: beyond 'the ruin of representation'; A beautiful attendant: the rise of the gothic aesthetics of the beautiful; A beautiful monster: the fall of the gothic aesthetics of the beautiful; Van Helsing's dilemma: science and Mill's utilitarianism; A humanistic science in a pragmatic society: re-reading Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith; The birth of cyborgothic: mothering the cyborg in Marge Piercy's He, She and It; Works cited; Index.
Dongshin Yi is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Texas A&M University, USA.
eBook
Empire Burlesque
Empire Burlesque traces the emergence of the contemporary global context within which American critical identity is formed. Daniel T. O'Hara argues that globalization has had a markedly negative impact on American cultural criticism, circumscribing both its material and imaginative potential, reducing much of it to absurdity. By highlighting the spectacle of its own self-parody, O'Hara aims to shock U.S. cultural criticism back into a sense of ethical responsibility.
Empire Burlesque presents several interrelated analyses through readings of a range of writers and cultural figures including Henry James, Freud, Said, De Man, Derrida, and Cordwainer Smith (an academic, spy, and classic 1950s and 1960s science fiction writer). It describes the debilitating effects of globalization on the university in general and the field of literary studies in particular, it critiques literary studies' embrace of globalization theory in the name of a blind and vacant modernization, and it meditates on the ways critical reading and writing can facilitate an imaginative alternative to institutionalized practices of modernization. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, it diagnoses contemporary American Studies as typically driven by the mindless abjection and transference of professional identities.
A provocative commentary on contemporary cultural criticism, Empire Burlesque will inform debates on the American university across the humanities, particularly among those in literary criticism, cultural studies, and American studies.
eBook
Canons by Consensus
The first systematic analysis of American literature
textbooks used by college instructors in the last
century Scholars have long noted the role that college
literary anthologies play in the rising and falling reputations
of American authors.
Canons by Consensus examines this classroom fixture in
detail to challenge and correct a number of assumptions about
the development of the literary canon throughout the 20th
century.
Joseph Csicsila analyzes more than 80 anthologies published
since 1919 and traces not only the critical fortunes of
individual authors, but also the treatment of entire genres and
groupings of authors by race, region, gender, and formal
approach. In doing so, he calls into question accusations of
deliberate or inadvertent sexism and racism. Selections by
anthology editors, Csicsila demonstrates, have always been
governed far more by prevailing trends in academic criticism
than by personal bias.
Academic anthologies are found to constitute a rich and
often overlooked resource for studying American literature, as
well as an irrefutable record of the academy’s changing
literary tastes throughout the last century.
eBook