The Task of Cultural Critique

The Task of Cultural Critique PDF Author: Teresa L. Ebert
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025209106X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness. Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.

The Task of Cultural Critique

The Task of Cultural Critique PDF Author: Teresa L. Ebert
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025209106X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness. Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.

The Task of Cultural Critique

The Task of Cultural Critique PDF Author: Teresa L. Ebert
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252034341
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
A bold and compelling remapping of contemporary cultural critique

Cultural Criticism

Cultural Criticism PDF Author: Arthur Asa Berger
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 9780803957343
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
Arthur Asa Berger's unique ability to translate difficult theories into accessible language makes this book an ideal introduction to cultural criticism. Berger covers the key theorists, concepts, and subject areas, from literary, sociological and psychoanalytical theories to semiotics and Marxism. Cultural Criticism breathes new life into the discipline by making these theories relevant to students' lives. The author illustrates his explanations with excerpts from classic works giving readers a sense of the important thinkers' styles and helping place them in their context. Berger also provides a comprehensive bibliography on cultural criticism for those who wish to explore the topics at greater length. Cultural Criticism is the perfect undergraduate supplemental text for such courses as media studies, literary criticism, and popular culture.

The Limits of Critique

The Limits of Critique PDF Author: Rita Felski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629403X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why do critics feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What is the rationale for their conviction that language is always withholding some important truth, that the critic's task is to unearth what is unsaid, naturalized, or repressed? These are the features of critique, a mode of thought that thoroughly dominates academic criticism. In this book, Rita Felski brilliantly exposes critique's more troubling qualities and proposes alternatives to it. Critique, she argues, is not just a method but also a sensibility--one best captured by Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion." As the characteristic affect of critique, suspicion, Felski shows, helps us understand critique's seductions and limitations. The questions that Felski poses about critique have implications well beyond intramural debates among literary scholars. Literary studies, says Felski, is facing a legitimation crisis thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves the field struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? For Felski, the tendencies to make literary texts the object of suspicious reading or, conversely, impute to them qualities of critique, forecloses too many other possibilities. Felski offers an alternative model that she calls "postcritical reading." Rather than looking behind the text for its hidden causes, conditions, and motives, she suggests that literary scholars place themselves in front of a text, reflecting on what it calls forth and makes possible. Here Felski enlists the work of Bruno Latour to rethink reading as a co-production between actors, rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking. As a scholar with an abiding respect for theory who has long deployed elements of critique in her own work, Felski is able to provide an insider's account of critique's limits and alternatives that will resonate widely in the humanities.

Distinction

Distinction PDF Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113587316X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 641

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines differences in taste between modern French classes, discusses the relationship between culture and politics, and outlines the strategies of pretension.

Bodies and Artefacts: Historical Materialism as Corporeal Semiotics (2 vols.)

Bodies and Artefacts: Historical Materialism as Corporeal Semiotics (2 vols.) PDF Author: Joseph Fracchia
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004471596
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1450

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a seemingly offhand, often overlooked comment, Karl Marx deemed ‘human corporeal organisation’ the ‘first fact of human history’. Following Marx’s corporeal turn and pursuing the radical implications of his corporeal insight, this book undertakes a reconstruction of the corporeal foundations of historical materialism. Part I exposes the corporeal roots of Marx’s materialist conception of history and historical-materialist Wissenschaft. Part II attempts a historical-materialist mapping of human corporeal organisation. Suggesting how to approach human histories up from their corporeal foundations, Part III elaborates historical-materialism as ‘corporeal semiotics’. Part IV, a case study of Marx’s critique of capitalist socio-economic and cultural forms, reveals the corporeal foundations of that critique and the corporeal depth of his vision of human freedom and dignity.

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time PDF Author: Matthew Arnold
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description


Reason and Morality

Reason and Morality PDF Author: Joanna Overing
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135800464
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
First Published in 1985. What is the place of reason and conversely of the unreasonable, the contradictory, the emotional and the chaotic in social life? What is the nature of general human rationality? Are there such things as incommensurable world views? How efficacious are typologies or 'modes of thought' or cognitive styles? These are some of the controversies addressed by the contributors to this volume which draws together papers from the 1984 Malinowski Centennial Conference of the ASA.

Prisms

Prisms PDF Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262510257
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Essays on Veblen, Huxley, Benjamin, Bach, Proust, Schoenberg, Spengler, jazz, Kafka"--Jacket subtitle.

Theology as Cultural Critique

Theology as Cultural Critique PDF Author: Jonathan R. Wilson
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 9780865545229
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description