Critical Genealogies

Critical Genealogies PDF Author: Jonathan Arac
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1583481125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Reassessing the ancestry of contemporary criticism, Jonathan Arac opens current debates over English studies to a larger understanding of cultural and political history, from romanticism through postmodernism. This work of creative scholarship enlarges our knowledge of the history of criticism while also exemplifying a new practice of writing literary history. Arac draws new lines from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Arnold to their modern successors and to recent developments in Marxism and poststructuralism.

Critical Genealogies

Critical Genealogies PDF Author: Jonathan Arac
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1583481125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reassessing the ancestry of contemporary criticism, Jonathan Arac opens current debates over English studies to a larger understanding of cultural and political history, from romanticism through postmodernism. This work of creative scholarship enlarges our knowledge of the history of criticism while also exemplifying a new practice of writing literary history. Arac draws new lines from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Arnold to their modern successors and to recent developments in Marxism and poststructuralism.

Biblical Genealogies: A Form-Critical Analysis, with a Special Focus on Women

Biblical Genealogies: A Form-Critical Analysis, with a Special Focus on Women PDF Author: Hedda Klip
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900447255X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
This book brings to light how the genealogies in the Bible are a developing genre, flexible in both patterns and deviations, allowing the inclusion of otherwise absent family members like mothers and daughters.

Genealogy as Critique

Genealogy as Critique PDF Author: Colin Koopman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253006236
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.

Invisible Genealogies

Invisible Genealogies PDF Author: Regna Darnell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803219151
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Invisible Genealogies is a landmark reinterpretation of the history of anthropology in North America. During the past two decades, theorizing by many American anthropologists has called for an "experimental moment" grounded in explicit self-reflexive scholarship and experimentation with alternate forms of presentation. Such postmodern anthropology has effectively downplayed connections with past luminaries in the field, whose scholarship is perceived to be uncomfortably colonialist and nonreflexive. Ironically, as the American Anthropological Association nears its one hundredth anniversary and interest in the history of the discipline is at an all-time high, that history has been effectively presented as removed from and irrelevant to the new generation. Invisible Genealogies offers an alternative, compelling vision of the development of anthropology in North America, one that emphasizes continuity rather than discontinuity from legendary founder Franz Boas to the present. Regna Darnell identifies key interpretive assumptions and practices that have persisted, sometimes in modified form, since the groundbreaking work of A. L. Kroeber, Boas, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Elsie Clews Parsons, Paul Radin, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and A. Irving Hallowell during the founding decades of anthropology. Also highlighted are the Americanist roots of postmodern anthropology and the work of innovative recent scholars like Claude Lävi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz.

Genealogies of Terrorism

Genealogies of Terrorism PDF Author: Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023154717X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
What is terrorism? What ought we to do about it? And why is it wrong? We think we have clear answers to these questions. But acts of violence, like U.S. drone strikes that indiscriminately kill civilians, and mass shootings that become terrorist attacks when suspects are identified as Muslim, suggest that definitions of terrorism are always contested. In Genealogies of Terrorism, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson rejects attempts to define what terrorism is in favor of a historico-philosophical investigation into the conditions under which uses of this contested term become meaningful. The result is a powerful critique of the power relations that shape how we understand and theorize political violence. Tracing discourses and practices of terrorism from the French Revolution to late imperial Russia, colonized Algeria, and the post-9/11 United States, Erlenbusch-Anderson examines what we do when we name something terrorism. She offers an important corrective to attempts to develop universal definitions that assure semantic consistency and provide normative certainty, showing that terrorism means many different things and serves a wide range of political purposes. In the tradition of Michel Foucault’s genealogies, Erlenbusch-Anderson excavates the history of conceptual and practical uses of terrorism and maps the historically contingent political and material conditions that shape their emergence. She analyzes the power relations that make different modes of understanding terrorism possible and reveals their complicity in justifying the exercise of sovereign power in the name of defending the nation, class, or humanity against the terrorist enemy. Offering an engaged critique of terrorism and the mechanisms of social and political exclusion that it enables, Genealogies of Terrorism is an empirically grounded and philosophically rigorous critical history with important political implications.

In Between Subjects

In Between Subjects PDF Author: Amelia Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000208036
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
This volume is a study of the connected ideas of "queer" and "gender performance" or "performativity" over the past several decades, providing an ambitious history and crucial examination of these concepts while questioning their very bases. Addressing cultural forms from 1960s–70s sociology, performance art, and drag queen balls to more recent queer voguing performances by Pasifika and Māori people from New Zealand and pop culture television shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, the book traces how and why "queer" and "performativity" seem to belong together in so many discussions around identity, popular modes of gender display, and performance art. Drawing on art history and performance studies but also on feminist, queer, and sexuality studies, and postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race theoretical frameworks, it seeks to denaturalize these assumptions by questioning the US-centrism and white-dominance of discourses around queer performance or performativity. The book’s narrative is deliberately recursive, itself articulated in order performatively to demonstrate the specific valence and social context of each concept as it emerged, but also the overlap and interrelation among the terms as they have come to co-constitute one another in popular culture and in performance and visual arts theory, history, and practice. Written from a hybrid art historical and performance studies point of view, this will be essential reading for all those interested in art, performance, and gender, as well as in queer and feminist theory.

Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius

Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius PDF Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231139793
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
Jacques Derrida argues that the feminist and intellectual Hélène Cixous is the most important writer working within the French idiom today. To prove this, he elucidates the epistemological and historical interconnectedness of four terms: genesis, genealogy, genre, and genius, and how they pertain to or are implicated in Cixous's work. Derrida explores Cixous's genius (a masculine term in French, he is quick to point out) and the inspiration that guides and informs her writing. He marvels at her skillful working within multiple genres. He focuses on a number of her works, including her extraordinary novel Manhattan and her lyrical and evocative Dream I Tell You, a book addressed to Derrida himself and one in which Cixous presents a series of her dreams. Derrida also delves into the nature of the literary archive, the production of literature, and the importance of the poetic and sexual difference to the entirety of his own work. For forty years, Derrida had a close personal and intellectual relationship with Hélène Cixous. Clever, playful, and eloquent, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius charts the influence these two critical giants had on each other and is the most vital work to address Cixous's contribution to French thought.

The Nature of Philosophical Problems

The Nature of Philosophical Problems PDF Author: John Kekes
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191021369
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
We must all make choices about how we want to live. We evaluate our possibilities by relying on historical, moral, personal, political, religious, and scientific modes of evaluations, but the values and reasons that follow from them conflict. Philosophical problems are forced on us when we try to cope with such conflicts. There are reasons for and against all proposed ways of coping with the conflicts, but none of them has been generally accepted by reasonable thinkers. The constructive aim of The Nature of Philosophical Problems is to propose a way of understanding the nature of such philosophical problems, explain why they occur, why they are perennial, and propose a pluralist approach as the most reasonable way of coping with them. This approach is practical, context-dependent, and particular. It follows from it that the recurrence of philosophical problems is not a defect, but a welcome consequence of the richness of our modes of understanding that enlarges the range of possibilities by which we might choose to live. The critical aim of the book is to give reasons against both the absolutist attempt to find an overriding value or principle for resolving philosophical problems and of the relativist claim that reasons unavoidably come to an end and how we want to live is ultimately a matter of personal preference, not of reasons.

Genealogies of the Secular

Genealogies of the Secular PDF Author: Willem Styfhals
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438476396
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Presents a historical and philosophical overview of the twentieth-century German debates on secularization, and their significance for contemporary discussions about the relationship between theology and modernity. While the concept of secularization is traditionally used to define the nature of modern culture, and sometimes to uncover the theological origins of secular modernity, its validity is being questioned ever more radically today. Genealogies of the Secular returns to the historical, intellectual, and philosophical roots of this concept in the twentieth-century German debates on religion and modernity, and presents a wide range of strategies that German thinkers have applied to apprehend the connection between religion and secularism. In fundamentally heterogeneous ways, these strategies all developed “genealogies of the secular” by tracing modern phenomena back to their religious or theological roots. This book aims to disclose the complex prehistory of the contemporary debates on political theology and postsecularism, and to show how prominent thinkers continue this German tradition today. It explores and assesses the classic theories of secularization that are epitomized in Carl Schmitt’s writings on political theology, but also addresses German philosophers whose work has been rarely associated with secularization, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Hannah Arendt. Attention is also paid to two thinkers whose role in these discourses has not been fully explored yet: Jacob Taubes and Jan Assmann. By introducing their thinking on religion, politics, and secularization, the book also makes two of their own key texts available to an English-language readership. “What makes the book so valuable pedagogically is the clarity and scope of its synthetic gestures about the dense questions congealing around the topic of secularization. It offers a pronouncement of central significance, emerging from some of the most important contemporary voices in these fields. The scholarship is internationally informed and engaged, even as it feels vibrant, immediate, and agenda setting.” — Ward Blanton, University of Kent, Canterbury

The Ethics of Marginality

The Ethics of Marginality PDF Author: John Champagne
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816625338
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Is celebration of culturally marginalized people by the dominant culture actually benefitting those who are oppressed? Whose stakes are served in such a celebration, and how are existing power relations altered? These are some of the questions John Champagne asks in this original and timely critique, which moves gay studies beyond both identity politics and the "rights" discourse within which much of contemporary gay studies is positioned. Champagne argues that in the modern West, culturally marginalized people such as gays cannot define and legitimate their own existence outside the framework established for them by the dominant group. To illustrate his premise, Champagne analyzes a number of recent films, including Paris is Burning, Urinal, and Marlon Riggs' 1989 video Tongues Untied, along with gay pornography, using the work of such critics of difference as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Spivak. He calls on the marginalized individual to elaborate a practice of critical self-conduct and to work to understand his or her own subjectivity as having been produced as an entity along a variety of different registers, only some of which might be said to be marginalized. The Ethics of Marginality situates itself at the intersection of English, cultural studies, film studies, and gay and lesbian studies. It offers a powerful critique of contemporary approaches to studies of the "other," while promising to establish a groundbreaking and controversial new theoretical model for such studies.