Josh Toth | MacEwan University (original) (raw)

Papers by Josh Toth

Contemporary Vulnerabilities (ed. Pier Paolo Piciucco) , 2023

This chapter explores the ethics of contemporary American memoir, while also stressing the etymol... more This chapter explores the ethics of contemporary American memoir, while
also stressing the etymological link between physical wounds and states of vulnerability. The central focus is autobiographical “fictions” that repudiate or move beyond the perverse irresponsibility (or ungroundedness) of the postmodern subject. Texts such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt (2011) traverse, while sustaining, a kind of ontological gap, a wound of
vulnerability. Associated in both texts with a “real life” and “undeniable” trauma (domestic abuse and the death of a child, respectively), this wound is proffered and sustained as the tender and always dehiscing gap between fiction and truth, the self who expresses and the self who is expressed, the form and its anterior content. Whether we speak more specifically about such narrative vulnerability as being “well approximated” or more troublingly “diffuse,” the sense we get is that an ethical memoir entails a radically “open” subject—endless self-exposure. The reader is allowed “in” even as (or because) the narrative threshold, the cusp of the Real, is sustained as an infinite distance. More autoplastic than autobiographic, such fictions harbour and sustain a traumatic intrusion of otherness, an infinitely proximate (or perpetually vulnerable) self.

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Textual Practice, 2023

This article reads Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) as an exemplary effort to move bey... more This article reads Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) as an exemplary effort to move beyond paranoid ‘critique’ in literary study – an effort that oddly echoes the ongoing intensification of postmodernity, or a socio-economic state no longer capable of imagining a future. Alternative modes of expression and identity are now only ever, in Mark Fisher’s terms, ‘precorporated’ – structured and anticipated by an always exploitative capitalist culture. Literary criticism’s on-going investment in micro-genres and increasingly atomized modes of criticism seems, in this sense, troublingly and paradoxically caught in the inertia of ‘depthlessness.’ The postcritical turn, more specifically, presents as both a consequence and an overt advocation of imprisoning surfaces. It strives to reclaim the experience of authentic expression and true, authorial affects by actively eschewing distance, or depth; but this refusal of distance and depth is tantamount to a refusal of otherness and incommensurable affect. To be affected by otherness is to touch upon what is unknown and unnamable. If we are to begin ‘reading well’ we cannot simply bask in the coherence of a surface. To ‘read well,’ we must instead tarry with the infinite potential of unmappable depth, a kind of Hegelian negative.

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The Future of the Post: New Insights in the Postmodern Debate (eds. Luca Malavasi and Elisa Bricco), 2022

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New Directions in Philosophy and Literature (eds. David Rudrum, Ridvan Askin, Frida Beckman), 2019

From David Rudrum's Introduction to "PART I - Beyond the Postmodern: Literature, Philosophy, and ... more From David Rudrum's Introduction to "PART I - Beyond the Postmodern: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of the Contemporary":

"Josh Toth, who coined the term ‘renewalism’ in his earlier work, argues in the next chapter that the evolving nature of metafiction reveals much about what lies beyond postmodernism. Moving on from what Linda Hutcheon influentially labelled ‘historiographic metafiction’ – taken at the time to be one of the most prominent genres of postmodern literature – Toth claims that although metafiction is still a thriving, vibrant tendency in the fiction of the twenty-first century, it now tends towards a historioplastic rather than a historiographic character. His notion of plasticity comes from Hegel, and in particular from recent reinterpretations of Hegel’s thought in the writings of Slavoj Žižek and Catherine Malabou, where plasticity means the infinite potential of the real (or, in Hegel’s terms, of spirit) to exceed the shapes and forms into which it is moulded. Historioplastic metafiction, Toth contends, involves a form of what Hegel calls ‘sublation’ – it both negates and renews the structures and strategies of postmodern fiction, holding onto them through a process of letting go. He illustrates his argument through a reading of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), a metafictional novel in which authenticity has become a marketing gimmick and handheld digital technology has debased language and expression to the point of infantilism, and yet the extreme and obvious nature of this debasement allows its narrators and characters to move beyond the recursive, nihilistic tropes of postmodernism, towards the reality and authenticity they are said to have lost. Thus, in a manner that recalls the ‘romantic art’ Hegel privileges in his Lectures on Aesthetics, novels like Egan’s work to sublate the more corrosive tendencies of postmodernism."

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Cultural Critique, 2018

Typically viewed as postmodern, the films of Tarantino and Nolan ultimately renew the possibility... more Typically viewed as postmodern, the films of Tarantino and Nolan ultimately renew the possibility of aesthetic responsibility by employing the very devices that seem wholly antithetical to such responsibility. Rather than fixating on the primacy of the signifier, on exposing the graphic or symbolic production of reality, these metafictional films shift our attention (in a specifically Hegelian manner) to a “plastic” Real that is effaced even as it effects the form of its representation. If Linda Hutcheon’s playful coinage—“historiographic metafiction”—best defines the dominant aesthetic form of the postmodern episteme, then these films represent the possibility of a historioplastic metafiction. They return us to the burden of mimetic responsibility by exposing the infinite mutability of a paradoxically finite truth. They thus exemplify an efficacious move out of postmodernism.

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Metamodernism Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (eds. Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen), 2017

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Facing Melville, Facing Italy: Democracy, Politics, Translation (eds. John Bryant, Giorgio Mariani, Gordon Poole), 2014

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Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2013

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Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction , 2013

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MELUS, 2008

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Mosaic, 2007

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Sartre Studies International, 2007

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North Dakota Quarterly, 2006

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Books by Josh Toth

Consisting of contributions from a host of international scholars (in fields as diverse as litera... more Consisting of contributions from a host of international scholars (in fields as diverse as literature, architecture, philosophy, and education), Alain Beauclair and Josh Toth's Nature and Its Unnatural Relations: Points of Access intercedes in ongoing debates about accessing, defining, and respecting a world humans continue to misuse and misunderstand-and that, as a result, is becoming increasingly inhospitable. The chapters shuttle between a variety of aesthetic and philosophical concerns-from theology and Biblical interpretation to colonialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, worlding, posthumanism, and speculative realism. These varied approaches are united by a single aporetic thread: efforts to surmount the problem of "human access" invariably risk repeating (ever more blindly) the violence and immorality of anthropocentrism. We seem trapped in the cul-de-sac of the Anthropocene. To discover potential new exits, the contributors consider whether it is possible or advisable to abandon so-called "correlationism"-of art, of literature, of technology. If it is, then how? If not, how might we more ethically reembrace our innately corruptive relations with a world of non-human others? How might we free "nature" (finally) from the demands of human action and human thought without mendaciously reinscribing humanity's distance from it or denying a proximity that is only traversable by artificial means?

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Truth and Metafiction: Plasticity and Renewal in American Narrative, 2021

Metafiction has long been associated with the heyday of literary postmodernism-with a certain sen... more Metafiction has long been associated with the heyday of literary postmodernism-with a certain sense of irresponsibility, political apathy, or outright nihilism. Yet, if (as is now widely assumed) postmodernism has finally run its course, how might we account for the proliferation of metafictional devices in contemporary narrative media? Does this persistence undermine the claim that postmodernism has passed, or has the function of metafiction somehow changed?

To answer these questions, Josh Toth considers a broad range of recent metafictional texts-by writers such as George Saunders and Jennifer Egan and directors such as Sofia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. At the same time, he traverses a diffuse theoretical landscape: from the rise of various new materialisms (in philosophy) and the turn to affect (in literary criticism) to the seemingly endless efforts to name postmodernism's ostensible successor.

Ultimately, Toth argues that much contemporary metafiction moves beyond postmodern skepticism to reassert the possibility of making true claims about real things. Capable of combating a “post-truth” crisis, such forms assert or assume a kind of Hegelian plasticity; they actively and persistently confront the trauma of what is infinitely mutable, or perpetually other. What is outside or before a given representation is confirmed and endured as that which exceeds the instance of its capture. The truth is thereby renewed; neither denied nor simply assumed, it is approached as ethically as possible. Its plasticity is grasped because the grasp, the form of its narrative apprehension, lets slip.

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Polyvocal Bob Dylan: Music, Performance, Literature, 2019

Polyvocal Bob Dylan brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholarly voices to explore the... more Polyvocal Bob Dylan brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholarly voices to explore the cultural and aesthetic impact of Dylan's musical and literary production. Significantly distinct in approach, each chapter draws attention to the function and implications of certain aspects of Dylan's work—his tendency to confuse, question, and subvert literary, musical, and performative traditions. Polyvocal Bob Dylan places Dylan's textual and performative art within and against a larger context of cultural and literary studies. In doing so, it invites readers to reassess how Dylan's Nobel Prize–winning work fits into and challenges traditional conceptions of literature.

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Stranger America: A Narrative Ethics of Exclusion, 2018

Contradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America’s democratic state. We nee... more Contradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America’s democratic state. We need look no further than Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and victory for proof that early twentieth-century anxieties about individualism, race, and the foreign or intrusive "other" persist today. In Stranger America, Josh Toth tracks and delineates these anxieties in America’s aesthetic production, finally locating a potential narrative strategy for circumnavigating them.

Toth’s central focus is, simply, strangeness—or those characters who adamantly resist being fixed in any given category of identity. As with the theorists employed (Nancy, Žižek, Derrida, Freud, Hegel), the subjects and literature considered are as encompassing as possible: from the work of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen to that of Philip K. Dick, Woody Allen, Larry David, and Bob Dylan; from the rise of nativism in the early twentieth century to object-oriented ontology and the twenty-first-century zombie craze; from ragtime and the introduction of sound in American cinema to the exhaustion of postmodern metafiction.

Toth argues that American literature, music, film, and television can show us the path toward a new ethic, one in which we organize identity around the stranger rather than resorting to tactics of pure exclusion or inclusion. Ultimately, he provides a new narrative approach to otherness that seeks to realize a truly democratic form of community.

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The Passing Of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary, 2010

The Passing of Postmodernism addresses the increasingly prevalent assumption that a period marked... more The Passing of Postmodernism addresses the increasingly prevalent assumption that a period marked by poststructuralism and metafiction has passed and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics. In discussions of various twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, directors, and theorists—from Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek to Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch—Josh Toth demonstrates that a certain utopian spirit persisted within, and actually defined, the postmodern project. Just as modernism was animated by an idealistic belief that it could finally realize the utopia beckoning on the horizon, postmodernism was compelled by an equally utopian belief that it could finally reject the possibility of all such illusory ideals. Toth argues that this specter of an impossible future is and must remain both possible and impossible, a ghostly promise of what is always still to come.

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The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism, 2007

Have we moved beyond postmodernism? Did postmodernism lose its oppositional value when it became ... more Have we moved beyond postmodernism? Did postmodernism lose its oppositional value when it became a cultural dominant? While focusing on questions such as these, the articles in this collection consider the possibility that the death of a certain version of postmodernism marks a renewed attempt to re-negotiate and perhaps re-embrace many of the cultural, literary and theoretical assumptions that postmodernism seemly denied outright. Including contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field – N. Katherine Hayles, John D. Caputo, Paul Maltby, Jane Flax, among others – this collection ultimately comes together to perform a certain work of mourning. Through their explorations of this current epistemological shift in narrative and theoretical production, these articles work to “get over” postmodernism while simultaneously celebrating a certain postmodern inheritance, an inheritance that can offer us important avenues to understanding and affecting contemporary culture and society.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Contemporary Vulnerabilities (ed. Pier Paolo Piciucco) , 2023

This chapter explores the ethics of contemporary American memoir, while also stressing the etymol... more This chapter explores the ethics of contemporary American memoir, while
also stressing the etymological link between physical wounds and states of vulnerability. The central focus is autobiographical “fictions” that repudiate or move beyond the perverse irresponsibility (or ungroundedness) of the postmodern subject. Texts such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt (2011) traverse, while sustaining, a kind of ontological gap, a wound of
vulnerability. Associated in both texts with a “real life” and “undeniable” trauma (domestic abuse and the death of a child, respectively), this wound is proffered and sustained as the tender and always dehiscing gap between fiction and truth, the self who expresses and the self who is expressed, the form and its anterior content. Whether we speak more specifically about such narrative vulnerability as being “well approximated” or more troublingly “diffuse,” the sense we get is that an ethical memoir entails a radically “open” subject—endless self-exposure. The reader is allowed “in” even as (or because) the narrative threshold, the cusp of the Real, is sustained as an infinite distance. More autoplastic than autobiographic, such fictions harbour and sustain a traumatic intrusion of otherness, an infinitely proximate (or perpetually vulnerable) self.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Textual Practice, 2023

This article reads Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) as an exemplary effort to move bey... more This article reads Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) as an exemplary effort to move beyond paranoid ‘critique’ in literary study – an effort that oddly echoes the ongoing intensification of postmodernity, or a socio-economic state no longer capable of imagining a future. Alternative modes of expression and identity are now only ever, in Mark Fisher’s terms, ‘precorporated’ – structured and anticipated by an always exploitative capitalist culture. Literary criticism’s on-going investment in micro-genres and increasingly atomized modes of criticism seems, in this sense, troublingly and paradoxically caught in the inertia of ‘depthlessness.’ The postcritical turn, more specifically, presents as both a consequence and an overt advocation of imprisoning surfaces. It strives to reclaim the experience of authentic expression and true, authorial affects by actively eschewing distance, or depth; but this refusal of distance and depth is tantamount to a refusal of otherness and incommensurable affect. To be affected by otherness is to touch upon what is unknown and unnamable. If we are to begin ‘reading well’ we cannot simply bask in the coherence of a surface. To ‘read well,’ we must instead tarry with the infinite potential of unmappable depth, a kind of Hegelian negative.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

The Future of the Post: New Insights in the Postmodern Debate (eds. Luca Malavasi and Elisa Bricco), 2022

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

New Directions in Philosophy and Literature (eds. David Rudrum, Ridvan Askin, Frida Beckman), 2019

From David Rudrum's Introduction to "PART I - Beyond the Postmodern: Literature, Philosophy, and ... more From David Rudrum's Introduction to "PART I - Beyond the Postmodern: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of the Contemporary":

"Josh Toth, who coined the term ‘renewalism’ in his earlier work, argues in the next chapter that the evolving nature of metafiction reveals much about what lies beyond postmodernism. Moving on from what Linda Hutcheon influentially labelled ‘historiographic metafiction’ – taken at the time to be one of the most prominent genres of postmodern literature – Toth claims that although metafiction is still a thriving, vibrant tendency in the fiction of the twenty-first century, it now tends towards a historioplastic rather than a historiographic character. His notion of plasticity comes from Hegel, and in particular from recent reinterpretations of Hegel’s thought in the writings of Slavoj Žižek and Catherine Malabou, where plasticity means the infinite potential of the real (or, in Hegel’s terms, of spirit) to exceed the shapes and forms into which it is moulded. Historioplastic metafiction, Toth contends, involves a form of what Hegel calls ‘sublation’ – it both negates and renews the structures and strategies of postmodern fiction, holding onto them through a process of letting go. He illustrates his argument through a reading of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), a metafictional novel in which authenticity has become a marketing gimmick and handheld digital technology has debased language and expression to the point of infantilism, and yet the extreme and obvious nature of this debasement allows its narrators and characters to move beyond the recursive, nihilistic tropes of postmodernism, towards the reality and authenticity they are said to have lost. Thus, in a manner that recalls the ‘romantic art’ Hegel privileges in his Lectures on Aesthetics, novels like Egan’s work to sublate the more corrosive tendencies of postmodernism."

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Cultural Critique, 2018

Typically viewed as postmodern, the films of Tarantino and Nolan ultimately renew the possibility... more Typically viewed as postmodern, the films of Tarantino and Nolan ultimately renew the possibility of aesthetic responsibility by employing the very devices that seem wholly antithetical to such responsibility. Rather than fixating on the primacy of the signifier, on exposing the graphic or symbolic production of reality, these metafictional films shift our attention (in a specifically Hegelian manner) to a “plastic” Real that is effaced even as it effects the form of its representation. If Linda Hutcheon’s playful coinage—“historiographic metafiction”—best defines the dominant aesthetic form of the postmodern episteme, then these films represent the possibility of a historioplastic metafiction. They return us to the burden of mimetic responsibility by exposing the infinite mutability of a paradoxically finite truth. They thus exemplify an efficacious move out of postmodernism.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Metamodernism Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (eds. Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen), 2017

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Facing Melville, Facing Italy: Democracy, Politics, Translation (eds. John Bryant, Giorgio Mariani, Gordon Poole), 2014

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2013

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction , 2013

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

MELUS, 2008

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Mosaic, 2007

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Sartre Studies International, 2007

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

North Dakota Quarterly, 2006

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Consisting of contributions from a host of international scholars (in fields as diverse as litera... more Consisting of contributions from a host of international scholars (in fields as diverse as literature, architecture, philosophy, and education), Alain Beauclair and Josh Toth's Nature and Its Unnatural Relations: Points of Access intercedes in ongoing debates about accessing, defining, and respecting a world humans continue to misuse and misunderstand-and that, as a result, is becoming increasingly inhospitable. The chapters shuttle between a variety of aesthetic and philosophical concerns-from theology and Biblical interpretation to colonialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, worlding, posthumanism, and speculative realism. These varied approaches are united by a single aporetic thread: efforts to surmount the problem of "human access" invariably risk repeating (ever more blindly) the violence and immorality of anthropocentrism. We seem trapped in the cul-de-sac of the Anthropocene. To discover potential new exits, the contributors consider whether it is possible or advisable to abandon so-called "correlationism"-of art, of literature, of technology. If it is, then how? If not, how might we more ethically reembrace our innately corruptive relations with a world of non-human others? How might we free "nature" (finally) from the demands of human action and human thought without mendaciously reinscribing humanity's distance from it or denying a proximity that is only traversable by artificial means?

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Truth and Metafiction: Plasticity and Renewal in American Narrative, 2021

Metafiction has long been associated with the heyday of literary postmodernism-with a certain sen... more Metafiction has long been associated with the heyday of literary postmodernism-with a certain sense of irresponsibility, political apathy, or outright nihilism. Yet, if (as is now widely assumed) postmodernism has finally run its course, how might we account for the proliferation of metafictional devices in contemporary narrative media? Does this persistence undermine the claim that postmodernism has passed, or has the function of metafiction somehow changed?

To answer these questions, Josh Toth considers a broad range of recent metafictional texts-by writers such as George Saunders and Jennifer Egan and directors such as Sofia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. At the same time, he traverses a diffuse theoretical landscape: from the rise of various new materialisms (in philosophy) and the turn to affect (in literary criticism) to the seemingly endless efforts to name postmodernism's ostensible successor.

Ultimately, Toth argues that much contemporary metafiction moves beyond postmodern skepticism to reassert the possibility of making true claims about real things. Capable of combating a “post-truth” crisis, such forms assert or assume a kind of Hegelian plasticity; they actively and persistently confront the trauma of what is infinitely mutable, or perpetually other. What is outside or before a given representation is confirmed and endured as that which exceeds the instance of its capture. The truth is thereby renewed; neither denied nor simply assumed, it is approached as ethically as possible. Its plasticity is grasped because the grasp, the form of its narrative apprehension, lets slip.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Polyvocal Bob Dylan: Music, Performance, Literature, 2019

Polyvocal Bob Dylan brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholarly voices to explore the... more Polyvocal Bob Dylan brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholarly voices to explore the cultural and aesthetic impact of Dylan's musical and literary production. Significantly distinct in approach, each chapter draws attention to the function and implications of certain aspects of Dylan's work—his tendency to confuse, question, and subvert literary, musical, and performative traditions. Polyvocal Bob Dylan places Dylan's textual and performative art within and against a larger context of cultural and literary studies. In doing so, it invites readers to reassess how Dylan's Nobel Prize–winning work fits into and challenges traditional conceptions of literature.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Stranger America: A Narrative Ethics of Exclusion, 2018

Contradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America’s democratic state. We nee... more Contradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America’s democratic state. We need look no further than Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and victory for proof that early twentieth-century anxieties about individualism, race, and the foreign or intrusive "other" persist today. In Stranger America, Josh Toth tracks and delineates these anxieties in America’s aesthetic production, finally locating a potential narrative strategy for circumnavigating them.

Toth’s central focus is, simply, strangeness—or those characters who adamantly resist being fixed in any given category of identity. As with the theorists employed (Nancy, Žižek, Derrida, Freud, Hegel), the subjects and literature considered are as encompassing as possible: from the work of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen to that of Philip K. Dick, Woody Allen, Larry David, and Bob Dylan; from the rise of nativism in the early twentieth century to object-oriented ontology and the twenty-first-century zombie craze; from ragtime and the introduction of sound in American cinema to the exhaustion of postmodern metafiction.

Toth argues that American literature, music, film, and television can show us the path toward a new ethic, one in which we organize identity around the stranger rather than resorting to tactics of pure exclusion or inclusion. Ultimately, he provides a new narrative approach to otherness that seeks to realize a truly democratic form of community.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

The Passing Of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary, 2010

The Passing of Postmodernism addresses the increasingly prevalent assumption that a period marked... more The Passing of Postmodernism addresses the increasingly prevalent assumption that a period marked by poststructuralism and metafiction has passed and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics. In discussions of various twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, directors, and theorists—from Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek to Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch—Josh Toth demonstrates that a certain utopian spirit persisted within, and actually defined, the postmodern project. Just as modernism was animated by an idealistic belief that it could finally realize the utopia beckoning on the horizon, postmodernism was compelled by an equally utopian belief that it could finally reject the possibility of all such illusory ideals. Toth argues that this specter of an impossible future is and must remain both possible and impossible, a ghostly promise of what is always still to come.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism, 2007

Have we moved beyond postmodernism? Did postmodernism lose its oppositional value when it became ... more Have we moved beyond postmodernism? Did postmodernism lose its oppositional value when it became a cultural dominant? While focusing on questions such as these, the articles in this collection consider the possibility that the death of a certain version of postmodernism marks a renewed attempt to re-negotiate and perhaps re-embrace many of the cultural, literary and theoretical assumptions that postmodernism seemly denied outright. Including contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field – N. Katherine Hayles, John D. Caputo, Paul Maltby, Jane Flax, among others – this collection ultimately comes together to perform a certain work of mourning. Through their explorations of this current epistemological shift in narrative and theoretical production, these articles work to “get over” postmodernism while simultaneously celebrating a certain postmodern inheritance, an inheritance that can offer us important avenues to understanding and affecting contemporary culture and society.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact