Local transcendence : essays on postmodern historicism and the database / Alan Liu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Liu, Alan, 1953-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Criticism--History--20th century.

Criticism.

History.

Criticism--History--21st century.

Historicism.

Physical Description:

xii, 392 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2008]

Summary:

Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today's society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present-the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen. Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history.

In the essays collected in Local Transcendence, Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism-including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory-and digital information technology. What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, Liu asks, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicism? Local Transcendence includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction, in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.

Contents:

Introduction: Contingent Methods 1

1 The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism 29

2 Trying Cultural Criticism: Wordsworth and Subversion 71

3 Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail 109

4 Remembering the Spruce Goose: Historicism, Postmodernism, Romanticism 139

5 The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning 157

6 The Interdisciplinary War Machine 167

7 Sidney's Technology: A Critique by Technology of Literary History 187

8 Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse 209

9 Escaping History: The New Historicism, Databases, and Contingency 239.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [333]-359) and index.

ISBN:

9780226486956

0226486958

9780226486963

0226486966

OCLC:

192048211

Publisher Number:

99941673951

Online:

Publisher description