Index to Volume XXVI of Criticism (1984) (original) (raw)

This is the final copyedited version of "Theorizing the Subject" published in Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press. Article

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 Literature and Art Studies Vol.3 Issue 3 March 2013

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, a monthly professional academic journal, covers all sorts of researches on literature studies, art theory, appreciation of arts, culture and history of arts and other latest findings and achievements from experts and scholars all over the world.

Journal of Literature and Art Studies Vol.2 Issue 9 September 2012

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, a monthly professional academic journal, covers all sorts of researches on literature studies, art theory, appreciation of arts, culture and history of arts and other latest findings and achievements from experts and scholars all over the world.

Untitled Review of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the Wars, by Tyrus Miller [criticism].

Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 48 (2000): 281-85

Boox RBwnws 281 disingenuous and defensive. Though he describes Foucault's work as brilliant at one point (170, n. 89), he merely mentions it in passing; Baudrillard's work is dismissed in a note simply as "caricature" (155 n. 38); Said's critique of the appropriative effect of nineteenth-century Egyptology is described as "daft" (I41 n. 10); and Adorno is invoked simply a "colour of the month" (23). Had Sparshott engaged this critical tradition more seriously, his analysis of empire as an information system might have been situated more clearly in contemporary debates on that topic, and, more importantly, the potential force of his connections among aesthetics, axiology, and social practice may have emerged more clearly for a wider range of readers.

Journal of Literature and Art Studies Issue 1 Vol.11 2021 January

David Publishing Company, 2021

American novelist Philip Roth demonstrated admiration for and intimacy with Joseph Conrad's works. Testimonies abound of Roth's direct and oblique references to Conrad's novels. A close and comparative reading of Roth's American Pastoral and Conrad's Lord Jim reveals the intertextuality between the two novels in three aspects: narrative techniques, characterization and the protagonist's tragedy. By incorporating Conrad's Lord Jim into the fabric of American Pastoral through intertextuality, Roth rewrites Jim's story in a new historical and social context, throwing new light on the canonical work and revealing the dilemma and tragedy of American Jewish immigrants in their pursuit of American Dream.