Elegy for theory / D.N. Rodowick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rodowick, David Norman.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Philosophy.

Motion pictures.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (304 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Harvard University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In Elegy for Theory, D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970's and 1980's, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities. Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent--one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

In Place of Beginning ...

1. A Compass in a Moving World

2. Many Lines of Descent

3. Theoria as Practical Philosophy

4. The Sage Is Wise Only in Theory

5. Variations and Discontinuities: Aesthetic

6. How Art Found Theory

7. Philosophy before the Arts

8. The Rarity of Theory

9. On the History of Film Theory

10. Genres of Theory

11. Excursus: Ricciotto Canudo and the Aesthetic Discourse

12. On the Way to Language

13. The Travels of Formalism

14. An Uncertain and Irrational Art

15. A Small History of Structuralism

16. After the Long Eclipse

17. An Object, a Method, a Domain

18. A Care for the Claims of Theory

19. The Sense of an Ending

20. "Suddenly, an Age of Theory"

21. The Fifth Element

22. "A Struggle without End, Exterior and Interior"

23. Becoming a Subject in Theory

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780674727014

0674727010

9780674726086

0674726081

OCLC:

867050098