An aesthetic education in the era of globalization / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Aesthetics--Study and teaching--Philosophy.

Aesthetics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (624 p.)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Harvard University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

During the past twenty years, the world’s most renowned critical theorist—the scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studies—has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting the globalized present, she turns elsewhere to make her central argument: that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy. Spivak’s unwillingness to sacrifice the ethical in the name of the aesthetic, or to sacrifice the aesthetic in grappling with the political, makes her task formidable. As she wrestles with these fraught relationships, she rewrites Friedrich Schiller’s concept of play as double bind, reading Gregory Bateson with Gramsci as she negotiates Immanuel Kant, while in dialogue with her teacher Paul de Man. Among the concerns Spivak addresses is this: Are we ready to forfeit the wealth of the world’s languages in the name of global communication? “Even a good globalization (the failed dream of socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues must challenge,” Spivak writes. “The tower of Babel is our refuge.” In essays on theory, translation, Marxism, gender, and world literature, and on writers such as Assia Djebar, J. M. Coetzee, and Rabindranath Tagore, Spivak argues for the social urgency of the humanities and renews the case for literary studies, imprisoned in the corporate university. “Perhaps,” she writes, “the literary can still do something.”

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. The Burden of English

2. Who Claims Alterity?

3. How to Read a “Culturally Different” Book

4. The Double Bind Starts to Kick In

5. Culture: Situating Feminism

6. Teaching for the Times

7. Acting Bits/Identity Talk

8. Supplementing Marxism

9. What’s Left of Theory?

10. Echo

11. Translation as Culture

12. Translating into English

13. Nationalism and the Imagination

14. Resident Alien

15. Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching

16. Imperative to Re- imagine the Planet

17. Reading with Stuart Hall in “Pure” Literary Terms

18. Terror: A Speech after 9/11

19. Harlem

20. Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular

21. World Systems and the Creole

22. The Stakes of a World Literature

23. Rethinking Comparativism

24. Sign and Trace

25. Tracing the Skin of Day

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780674257931

0674257936

OCLC:

1252428528