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.

Criticism--History--21st century.

Historicism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (405 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c2008.

Language Note:

English

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 Local Transcendence includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to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:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Contingent Methods

1. The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism

2. Trying Cultural Criticism: Wordsworth and Subversion

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

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

5. The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning

6. The Interdisciplinary War Machine

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

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

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

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

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

ISBN:

9786612239724

9781282239722

1282239724

9780226486970

0226486974

OCLC:

432995193