Historicizing theory / edited by Peter C. Herman.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Herman, Peter C., 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Criticism--History--20th century.

Criticism.

History.

Physical Description:

vii, 324 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, 2003.

Summary:

Historicizing Theory provides the first serious examination of contemporary theory in relation to the various twentieth-century historical and political contexts out of which it emerged. Theory--a broad category that is often used to encompass theoretical approaches as varied as cleconstruction, New Historicism, and post colonialism--has often been derided as a mere "relic" of the 1960s. In order to move beyond such a simplistic assessment, the essays in this volume examine such important figures as Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt, and Edward Said, situating their work in a variety of contexts inside and outside of the 1960s, including World War 11, the Holocaust, the Algerian civil war, and the canon wars of the 1980s. In bringing us face-to-face with the history of theory, "Historicizing Theory recuperates history for theory and asks us to confront some of the central issues and problems in literary studies today.

Contents:

The Holocaust, French poststructuralism, the American literary academy, and Jewish identity poetics / Evan Carton

Michel Foucault and the specter of war / Karen Raber

Historicizing Paul de Man's master trope prosopopeia: Belgium's trauma of 1940, the Nazi Volkskorper, and versions of the allegorical body politic / James J. Paxson

"Nostalgeria" and "Structure, sign, play in the discourse of the human sciences" / Lee Morrissey

Jean Baudrillard and May '68: an acoustic archaeology / Andrea Loselle

Stephen Greenblatt's "X"-files: the rhetoric of containment and invasive disease in "Invisible bullets" and "The sources of Soviet conduct" / Jonathan Gil Harris

New historicizing the new historicism; or, Did Stephen Greenblatt watch the evening news in early 1968? / Ivo Kamps

The end of culture / Loren Glass

Literature, incorporated: Harold Bloom, theory, and the canon / Marc Redfield

The sixties, the new Left, and the emergence of cultural studies in the United States / David R. Shumway

The postcolonial godfather / H. Aram Veeser

The spectrality of the sixties / Benjamin Bertram

Afterword: Historicism and its limits / Morris Dickstein.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0791459616

0791459624

OCLC:

52257892