Does history produce discernible meaning? Are human struggles intelligible? These questions form the starting-point for the second volume of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. Drafted in 1958 and published in France in 1985, this magisterial work first appeared in English in 1991 and now reappears with a major new introduction by Fredric Jameson.

Volume Two's theoretical framework is a logical extension of the predecessor's. As in Volume One, Sartre proceeds by moving from the simple to the complex: from individual combat (through a perceptive study of boxing) to the struggle...

"Take Faust, what is it? A 'tragedy', as its author states? A great philosophical tale? A collection of lyrical insights? Who can say. How about Moby-Dick? Encyclopedia, novel or romance? Or even a 'singular medley, ' as one anonymous 1851 review put it? ... 'It is no longer a novel, ' T.S. Eliot said of Ulysses. But if not novels, then what are they?"

Literary history has long been puzzled by how to classify and treat these aesthetic monuments. In this highly original and interdisciplinary work, Franco Moretti builds a theory of the modern epic: a sort of super-genre...

First published in 1930, Siegfried Kracauer's work was greeted with great acclaim and soon attained the status of a classic. The object of his inquiry was the new class of salaried employees who populated the cities of Weimar Germany.

Spiritually homeless, divorced from all custom and tradition, these white-collar workers sought refuge in entertainment--or the "distraction industries," as Kracauer put it--but, only three years later, were to flee into the arms of Adolf Hitler. Eschewing the instruments of traditional sociological scholarship, but without collapsing into mere journalistic...