CFP PhD Symposium - Questions of Scale in Contemporary Literature and Criticism - Ghent University, 23-25 March 2016 (original) (raw)
Theorizing the Subject, 2020
Ever since the Greek philosophers and fabulists pondered the question "What is man?," inquiries into the concept of the subject have troubled humanists, eventuating in fierce debates and weighty tomes. In the wake of the Descartes's cogito and Enlightenment thought, proposals for an ontology of the idealist subject's rationality, autonomy, and individualism generated tenacious questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions, the subject-object relation, and the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Marx, and theorists he and Engels influenced, pursued the materialist bases of the subject, through analyses of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false consciousness. Through another lineage, Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its relationship to signifying systems. By the latter 20th century, theorizations of becoming a gendered woman by Beauvoir, of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault and Althusser, and of structuralist dynamics of the symbolic realm expounded by Lacan, energized a succession of poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and new materialist theorists to advance one critique after another of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as individualist, disembodied (Western) Man. In doing so, they elaborated conditions through which subjects are gendered and racialized and offered explanatory frameworks for understanding subjectivity as an effect of positionality within larger formations of patriarchy, slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. By the early decades of the 21st Formatted: Centered Deleted: Nineteenth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: racialized, and Deleted: Twenty-first century, posthumanist theorists dislodged the subject as the center of agentic action and distributed its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, trans-corporeality, algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. Persistently, theorists of the subject referred to an entangled set of related but distinct terms, such as the human, person, self, ego, interiority, and personal identity. And across diverse humanities disciplines, they struggled to define and refine constitutive features of subject formation, most prominently relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment.
Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2014
is a valuable encyclopedic guide to the explosion of theory of the last forty years. It offers alphabetized, cross-referenced introductions both to major figures in literary and cultural criticism and to many, if not most, of the key movements in the field, such as cultural studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, as well as to less obvious areas such as ethics and the conjunction of law and literature. This is not an anthology of theorists' writing or a general history of theory. But what it does, it does well. Most of the major figures and key movements can be found here, and the two-to six-page entries clearly sum up their impact and point to the most important primary and secondary works. The text, therefore, effectively meets its goal of providing an "easy to access" reference for scholars and students "who do not have specialized knowledge" in the field (ix). The editors provide brief, clear overviews of forty-eight major figures in Western literary and cultural criticism of the last fifty years. Entries, in alphabetical order, cover the temporal spectrum from Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure to current prominent thinkers in the field, such as Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben. The majority of the thinkers represented here, however, began their academic studies in the middle of the twentieth century and were therefore well positioned to take prominent roles in shaping theoretical approaches in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This selection of theorists represents Anglo-American,
London Conference of Critical Thought 2015
The Return of Actor-Network Theory: During the last ten years there has been an unexpected resurgence of interest in the body of literature-cum-methodological toolkit known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and primarily associated with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. A cross-disciplinary revival, it encompasses philosophy and media theory (the new materialisms, ‘thing theory’, and the Object-Oriented Philosophy of Graham Harman and his adherents), the digital humanities (the rise of digital methods for tracing networks in social science research), and the history and sociology of art (through the recent work on networks of human and nonhuman actors in avant-garde genres), amongst other disciplines. But this development is an intriguing one, not least because it was declared as early as the late 1990s that ANT was defunct, and that the name should be discarded. For example, in an essay called ‘On recalling ANT’, Latour announced that there were four ‘nails in the coffin’ for actor-network theory: ‘the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!’ Some aspects of this resurgence are simple enough to comprehend. Arriving just ahead of the World Wide Web, ANT would anticipate the vogue for thinking in terms of ‘networks’ as opposed to bordered entities such as ‘nation’, ‘institution’, and ‘society’, even if its own understanding of the concept was different to the topological webs of data it now seems to invoke. Similarly, its controversial injunction to afford agency to human and non-human actors alike, accepting no a priori asymmetry between them, can be seen as an important antecedent to the renewed turn towards materiality and the corresponding critique of anthropocentrism that has been gestating for some time in the humanities. But ANT has been criticised for its philosophical naïveté, its underdeveloped account of power, and its presentism, amongst other things. The time seems ripe to review the merits and limitations of ANT inside of this renewed context, asking whether its takeup in philosophy, media theory, and history of art reinvigorates ANT or repeats its perceived failings. This stream invites papers that a) Consider the contemporary currency of ANT as methodological practice: • Issues of translation: what frictions/novelties emerge when ANT is ‘applied’ outside of the Science and Technology Studies field in which it was originally developed? • Digital methods and ANT: the World Wide Web as a medium to locate and analyse networks: e.g. political controversies, social networks, art genres and movements etc. b) Critically engage with the legacy and philosophical presuppositions of ANT: • Empiricity and the place of the transcendental in ANT. • The mutation of ANT into Object-Oriented Ontology: Graham Harman as a reader of Latour. • ANT and ‘posthumanism’, or the critique of anthropocentrism: is there room for the subject in ANT? • The relationship between ANT and other important accounts of technological mediation, such as Derrida’s concept of originary technicity - recently taken up and expanded by Bernard Stiegler and David Wills. • Latour’s critique of modernity and the nature-culture / subject-object dichotomy, plus its relationship to earlier (dialectical, phenomenological, structuralist, post-structuralist) analyses.
A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory
Wiley eBooks, 2017
A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory offers a fresh perspective on both familiar and under-theorized questions and topics animating the field of contemporary critical and cultural theory. It provides a full account of the history and scope of the field, focusing on the most pressing questions and problems that occupy and impel contemporary theoretical discourse. Gathering together some of the most widely read and innovative theorists working today, this Companion offers essays designed to illuminate the topics that dominate theoretical debate. Framing its chapters around the problems and issues animating the field today, A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory offers a theoretical framework within which crucial questions, traditions, approaches, and concepts in critical and cultural theory take on newly generative valences. The essays collected in this book will provide a comprehensive account of the ways in which the study of literature and culture has been, and continues to be, challenged and energized by critical and cultural theory. Table of Contents Introduction xvii Imre Szeman, Sarah Blacker, and Justin Sully Part I Lineages 1 1 Frankfurt – New York – San Diego 1924–1968; or, Critical Theory 3 Andrew Pendakis 2 Vienna 1899 – Paris 1981; or, Psychoanalysis 25 James Penney 3 Paris 1955–1968; or, Structuralism 41 Sean Homer 4 Birmingham – Urbana‐Champaign 1964–1990; or, Cultural Studies 59 Paul Smith 5 Baltimore – New Haven 1966–1983; or, Deconstruction 73 Michael O’Driscoll 6 Paris – Boston – Berkeley – the Mexico/Texas Borderlands 1949–1990; or, Gender and Sexuality 91 Sarah Brophy 7 Delhi/Ahmednagar Fort – Washington, DC/Birmingham Jail – Pretoria/Robben Island 1947–1994; or, Race, Colonialism, Postcolonialism 115 Neil ten Kortenaar 8 Petrograd/Leningrad – Havana – Beijing 1917–1991; or, Marxist Theory and Socialist Practice 129 Peter Hitchcock 9 Chile – Seattle – Cairo 1973–2017?; or, Globalization and Neoliberalism 147 Myka Tucker‐Abramson Part II Problematics 167 Section A: Living and Laboring 167 10 Subjectivity 173 William Callison 11 Diaspora and Migration 191 Ghassan Hage 12 Community, Collectivity, Affinities 205 Miranda Joseph 13 Feminism 223 Rosemary Hennessy 14 Gender and Queer Theory 243 Amber Jamilla Musser 15 Social Divisions and Hierarchies 255 Randy Martin 16 Work and Precarity 269 Jason Read Section B: Being and Knowing 283 17 Religion and Secularism 287 Jerilyn Sambrooke 18 Affect 301 Marija Cetinić and Jeff Diamanti 19 Indigenous Epistemes 313 Rauna Kuokkanen 20 The Everyday, Taste, Class 327 Ben Highmore 21 Disability Studies 339 Anna Mollow 22 Unsound 357 Veit Erlmann 23 Screen Life 371 Toby Miller 24 Digital and New Media 387 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun 25 Science and Technology 403 Priscilla Wald Section C: Structures of Agency and Belonging 419 26 Circulation 423 Will Straw 27 Cultural Production 435 Sarah Brouillette 28 Decolonization 449 Jennifer Wenzel 29 Race and Ethnicity 465 Min Hyoung Song 30 Humanism 477 Nina Power 31 Nature 489 Stephanie LeMenager 32 Scale 503 Justin Sully 33 Narrative 517 Marie‐Laure Ryan Index 531
"Forgetting to be (Post)Human: Media and Memory in a Kairotic Age"
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility-without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises-were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Postmodernism and the Explosive Style of the Twenty-First Century
Russian Postmodernism
N ow we can hardly doubt that the last third of the twentieth century will enter cultural history under the name of postmodernism. The beginning of the twenty first century reacted ambivalently to this heritage. Many concepts that postmodernism introduced into global culture are now undergoing revision in attempt to reappropriate what was lost or rejected during the previous thirty years. The practices of quotation, allusion, intertextuality, and the traits of irony and eclecticism are still current, as well as skepticism toward the universality of canons and hierarchies of all kinds. However, postmodernism, as it is perceived now, got stuck at the level of language games: it was obsessed with overcoding, subtexts, and metatextuality, and did not recognize anything outside this domain. By the early twenty-first century, this game continued by inertia alongside the new realities that challenged it: the Iraqi War, Chechnya, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. … All these events took place far away from the United States, however, and major theoreticians such as Jean Baudrillard still were inclined to interpret them as postmodernist phenomena, including the mass media's control over the world scene and the information industry's games. The limits of the game suddenly became starkly defined on September 11, 2001. The entire postmodernist era ended with deadly Preface to the Second Edition | xv Preface to the Second Edition | xvii Preface to the Second Edition | xxi Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover's introduction "'New Sectarianism' and the Pleasure Principle in Postmodern Russian Culture." The selected bibliography has been expanded and updated.
LITCRI 15 IV LITERARY CRITICISM CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
https://www.dakam.org/archive-ijaus
Walter Benjamin states number of possibilities with regard to memory, change, and philosophy in his paper, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. He begins with the reception of lyrical poetry and later he moves towards the discussion on the general resistance which is being shown in accepting lyrical poetry. He mentions how people turn to philosophy when it comes to understand the change in life. Philosophy is an attempt to grasp the true nature of experience because often true experience and the standardized experience are indistinguishable. He claims the experience to be a matter of tradition in collective existence. He also considers it tobe a matter of private life. He suggests how the unconscious frequent memory actively involves itself in creating experience. And it is intriguing how we create complementary memory in opposed to the true memory in order to buffer the real experience. He brings Marcel Proust to farther discuss the creation and instigation of memory or the voluntary and involuntary memory. I would consider the Diasporic memory to be the involuntary memory. Involuntary memory is similar to Walter Benjamin's idea of "Moment of Crisis" mentioned in his These On the Philosophy of History. This is the process of contemporary memory triggering the memories of the past. Magical realist elements glues the fragmented puzzles of the memory hence, creates stimuli which eventually coordinates the process of memory recollection. Diasporic novels are an attempt to fight back the amnesia which is the inevitable effect of exile. Authors or the narrators continuously struggle with the voluntary and involuntary memory and sometimes through imagination, in order to protect the memories of the homeland. They do so to avoid the inevitable fall caused by the fragmented identity created by Diasporic memory. This paper is an attempt to understand and explore such power struggle between the memory and amnesia. Culture is a continuous process of selection and reselection. Therefore, the continuous process of selection and reselection exposes us to vertical hierarchical dimension of cultural hegemony. By vertical hierarchical dimension, I indicate the existence of hegemony in the act of selection. Therefore, culture involuntarily becomes a political tool of the hegemony. On the other hand, all
Literary Theory and Criticism (Fall 2012)
This is an introduction to the contemporary practice of literary criticism and to literary theory. We will be guided by questions around the acts of reading and writing: What is it to read? What presuppositions (social/cultural/political/etc.) do authors and critics bring to the text and how can we articulate them? How are we influenced in reading by our own presuppositions? And how do those presuppositions influence what we, in turn, write about literature and the theories that seek to illuminate it?
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2018
The turn of the millennium garnered a series of approaches that sought to redefine both the methodology used in cultural studies and literary theory and the new sensibility proposed by young authors and performers in the fields of art, music, film, literature, and new media. These approaches were also stimulated by the various shortcomings of the more historicised fields, such as traditional comparative studies, hermeneutics, deconstructivism or postmodernism, which were, since the eighties, subject to different attempts of methodological renewal and adjustment to the needs of the age of globalisation (World Literature studies is a good example of this methodological turn).
Modernity and Postmodernity. Some Reflections
Cultural Intertexts, 2018
Volume 8 of Cultural Intertexts-a Journal of Literature, Cultural Studies and Linguistics-brings together articles which result from research carried out by specialists at home and abroad. The common points of interest emerging from the authors' contributions are the representation of private and public selves, the politics behind the constructions of national, cultural and gender identity, as well as the more technical aspects of literary and filmic architectural design-with emphasis on experimentation, historiographic rewriting, intertextuality and the metadimension. The corpus under the lens includes a series of novels (What Maisie Knew, Rue with a Difference, American Psycho, One Flew over the Cuckoo"s Nest, Naked Lunch, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Hours, The Unbearable Lightness of Being), two plays (Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Noise) and two films (The Last Peasants. Journeys, Adaptation)-proposing incursions into older and newer, American and European writing which processes intriguing contexts, bears traces of earlier texts, and addresses a contemporary readership. A cultural anthropological study on the metamorphoses of Romanian identity inside the frontiers of Europe and/or within the European Union, as well as an analysis of the paradoxical fracture and merger identifiable with modernity and postmodernity, are also part of the collection. The editors would like to thank, once more, the members of the scientific committee, for the time and effort that went into reviewing the articles submitted, and for facilitating the publication of this volume.