The ethics of theory : philosophy, history, and literature / by Robert Doran.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Doran, Robert, 1968- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Critical theory.

Ethics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (241 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York : Bloomsbury, 2016.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"In The Ethics of Theory, Robert Doran offers the first broad assessment of the ethical challenges of Critical Theory across the humanities and social sciences, calling into question the sharp dichotomy typically drawn between the theoretical and the ethical, the analytical and the prescriptive. In a series of discrete but interrelated interventions, Doran exposes the ethical underpinnings of theoretical discourses that are often perceived as either oblivious to or highly skeptical of any attempt to define ethics or politics. Doran thus discusses a variety of themes related to the problematic status of ethics or the ethico-political in Theory: the persistence of existentialist ethics in structuralist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial writing; the ethical imperative of the return of the subject (self-creation versus social conformism); the intimate relation between the ethico-political and the aesthetic (including the role of literary history in Erich Auerbach and Edward Said); the political implications of a "philosophy of the present" for Continental thought (including Heidegger's Nazism); the ethical dimension of the debate between history and theory (including Hayden White's idea of the "practical past" and the question of Holocaust representation); the "ethical turn" in Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty; the post-1987 "political turn" in literary and cultural studies (especially as influenced by Said). Drawing from a broad range of Continental philosophers and cultural theorists, including many texts that have only recently become available, Doran charts a new path that recognizes the often complex motivations that underlie the critical impulse, motivations that are not always apparent or avowed."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Contents:

Philosophy

Ethics beyond existentialism and structuralism: Sartre's critique of dialectical reason and the debate with Levi-Strauss

Foucault's ethics of the self

Derrida in Heidelberg: the specter of Heidegger's Nazism and the question of ethics

Richard Rorty's cultural politics: ironist philosophy and the ethics of reading

History

From metahistory to the practical past: Hayden White's existentialist philosophy of history

Hayden White and the ethics of historiography literature

The ethics of conversion: metaphysical desire in Ren, Girard, and Jean-Paul Sartre

The ethics of realism: literary history and the sublime in Erich Auerbach's mimesis

The ethics of philology: Erich Auerbach and the fate of humanism

Edward Said, orientalism, and the political turn in literary and cultural studies.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

9781474225946

1474225942

9781474225953

1474225950

9781474225915

1474225918

OCLC:

948961388