Phillip Wegner | University of Florida (original) (raw)

Papers by Phillip Wegner

For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literar... more For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literary and cultural theory. In Periodizing Jameson , Phillip E. Wegner builds upon Jameson's unique dialectical method to demonstrate the value of Jameson's tools--periodization, the fourfold hermeneutic, and the Greimasian semiotic square, among others--and to develop virtuoso readings of Jameson's own work and the history of the contemporary American university in which it unfolds. Wegner shows how Jameson's work intervenes in particular social, cultural, and political situations, using his scholarship both to develop original explorations of nineteenth-century fiction, popular films, and other prominent theorists, and to examine the changing fortunes of theory itself. In this way, Periodizing Jameson casts new light on the potential of and challenges to humanist intellectual work in the present.

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, May 1, 2022

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 11, 2016

Utopian Studies, 2016

124 For instance, in his discussion of the historical marginalization of women and “Others,” Stee... more 124 For instance, in his discussion of the historical marginalization of women and “Others,” Steele writes that a patriarchal history neglected “women and their potential.” This does not progress to a sophisticated account, though, of female equality. Steele believes, very loosely citing through gesturing as a whole to Carol Gilligan et al.’s (1990) book on how the sexes speak of justice, that there is a “nuanced feminine instinct for compassion versus the male inclination to focus on black-and-white ‘justice’” (103). Steele does not, though, ascribe any value to women here other than their compassion. Overall, Steele’s manifesto for technoliberation was most interesting for me as a representative of the utopian genre. The positivist pathology that afflicts the work is reminiscent of other technological-fetishist discourses that were historically shown to lead to disaster (futurism, for example). While Steele may encourage a world in which all is open, however, I cannot but recommend to readers that they leave this book closed.

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 2010

Would you sacrifice yourself to change the future? The X-Files You and I Robert have observed his... more Would you sacrifice yourself to change the future? The X-Files You and I Robert have observed history. Time has been our glass. We are in history now, living in it, making it. Implicated? I am on a grail quest! The Da Vinci Code I take as my starting point in this paper the fact that the present moment has witnessed a resurgence of the production of the privileged socio-political genre of paranoia, the conspiracy narrative. From recent high profile films such as the remake of the Cold War classic,

Rethinking Marxism, Mar 1, 2000

Criticism-a Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, 2010

Cultural Critique, 1993

... different settings. The first of these setting-frames is constituted by the immediate, phenom... more ... different settings. The first of these setting-frames is constituted by the immediate, phenomenological space that Kim occupies-the "exotic land-scape" of India that continues to dazzle so many readers of Kip-ling's work. As the ...

Cr-the New Centennial Review, 2013

This woman from Oslo had on an enormous dress dotted all over with pockets. She would pull slips ... more This woman from Oslo had on an enormous dress dotted all over with pockets. She would pull slips of paper out of her pockets one by one, each with its story to tell, stories tried and true of people who wished to come back to life through witchcraft. And so she raised the dead and the forgotten, and from the depths of her dress sprang the odysseys and loves of the human animal who goes on living, who goes on speaking.-Eduardo Galeano, El libro de los abrazos [The Book of Embraces] (1989/ 1991) According to Feynman, a system has not just one history but every possible history.

Diacritics, 2009

, Archaeologies of the Future in the conclusion to Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late ... more , Archaeologies of the Future in the conclusion to Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), fredric Jameson offers the following observation concerning the "sartrean coinage" totalization: "'from time to time,' sartre says somewhere, 'you make a partial summing up.' the summing up, from a perspective or point of view, as partial as it must be, marks the project of totalization as the response to nominalism" [332]. it is just such an act of totalization, i argue, that takes place in Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005). Archaeologies is of course neither his final book-the years since its publication have already witnessed the release of The Modernist Papers (2007) and, shortly, Valences of the Dialectic (2009)-nor is it meant as the last word on the problems invoked throughout. it is, rather, the culminating point, a "partial summing up," of a number of historical and intellectual sequences unfolding within Jameson's project. i will elaborate upon some of the most important of these sequences in the pages that follow. Most significantly, I will draw upon the resources of Jameson's own earlier "modernist" classic, The Political Unconscious (1981), to show how Archaeologies represents a climactic moment in Jameson's extended engagement with the question of literary and cultural modernisms, one that clears the space for his (re)turn in his current work-in-progress to realism, which had also been among his earliest concerns. 1 Archaeologies of the Future is two long books combined into one; in this regard it is much like the single "volume" composed of the two books A Singular Modernity (2002) and The Modernist Papers. and like thomas more's Utopia-a book that is central to the concerns of Archaeologies-the second part was composed before the first, and brings together for the first time many of Jameson's most significant essays on science fiction and Utopian literature, including studies of the work of Charles fourier, Brian aldiss, Ursula K. le guin, Boris and arkady strugatsky, Vonda macintyre, a. e. Van Vogt, The first version of this essay was presented at a roundtable on archaeologies at the Society for Utopian Studies annual meeting in 2005. For two other contributions to the session, see the essays by Peter Fitting and Eric Cazdyn. 1. For some of Jameson's recent work on realism, see his essays in the volumes edited by Mat

The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, Aug 14, 2015

Science Fiction Film and Television, Feb 1, 2020

In the time I was working on this essay, a news story broke concerning a wrongful death lawsuit b... more In the time I was working on this essay, a news story broke concerning a wrongful death lawsuit brought against the police department in the Memphis suburb of Southaven, Mississippi, for the 2017 shooting of Ismael Lopez, an undocumented immigrant who had resided in the city for the previous 16 years. The lawyers for the defence argued that because Lopez was in the country illegally, he had no claim of equal protection under the law. Their court filing asserts: 'Ismael Lopez may have been a person on American soil but he was not one of the "We, the People of the United States" entitled to the civil rights invoked in this lawsuit' (Conley n.p.). I have no doubt that the readers of this essay are already painfully aware of how increasingly common such disturbing arguments have become since the selection in 2016 by the Electoral College of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States. Indeed, one of the few consistent planks in Trump's wildly oscillating ethno-nationalist agenda has been the dehumanisation and demonisation of immigrants, especially those from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and other crisis spots in the global neoliberal order. The grim realities of Trump's re-made America are at the heart of director Denis Villeneuve's film Blade Runner 2049 (US/UK/Hungary/Canada/Spain 2017), a sequel to Ridley Scott's landmark Blade Runner (US 1982). That the actions and policies of the Trump administration are of interest to Villeneuve should come as no surprise to viewers of his previous sf film, autumn 2016's highly lauded first contact narrative Arrival (US/Canada/India), an adaptation of one of the greatest works of sf published in the late twentieth century, Ted Chiang's 'Story of Your Life' (1998). Arrival diverges dramatically from Chiang's story in its addition of national and geopolitical allegorical narrative strands. The situation into which the alien 'heptapods' arrive is portrayed in the film as quite similar to our own, where the promise of global unity that seemed to be on the table in the first years following the end of the Cold War (and then again, in a darker fashion, after 11 September 2001) has given way to mutual suspicion and destructive competition between the planet's major powers, especially the US and China, as well as a resurgent populist neo-nationalism. The latter is signalled early in the film when following the arrival of the alien ships, the central protagonist, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is seen

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 2011

... Some of the most significant new fantasy fiction of this period includes McCaffrey&#x... more ... Some of the most significant new fantasy fiction of this period includes McCaffrey&#x27;s Dragonriders of Pern works, Le Guin&#x27;s Earthsea novels, Delany&#x27;s Return to Nevèrÿon series, Charles R. Saunders&#x27;s Imaro ... University of Iowa Press, 1992 Booker, M. Keith and Anne-Marie Thomas ...

Utopian Studies, 2019

ABSTRACT This article begins as a response to a review recently published in Utopian Studies. It ... more ABSTRACT This article begins as a response to a review recently published in Utopian Studies. It argues that the prescriptive forms of ethical criticism practiced in this review are symptomatic of more general trends in our scholarly communities. The article is modeled on Jacques Derrida's “Limited Inc a b c. …” In his essay, Derrida illustrates the ways that genres such as the review, reply, and response open up the temptation to not read and to slip into moralizing modes of ethical judgment. Following Derrida's lead, the response unfolds at once in terms of what J. L. Austin identifies as a constative and a performative utterance: In its contents, it addresses misrepresentations and unspoken “absolute presuppositions”; and in its form, it enacts some of the practices that would be necessary for a more productive, responsible, and generous—that is, utopian—way of performing our intellectual labors.