After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a general sense that the world was different that nothing would ever be the same settled upon a grieving nation; the events of that day were received as cataclysmic disruptions of an ordered world. Refuting this claim, David Simpson examines the complex and paradoxical character of American public discourse since that September morning, considering the ways the event has been aestheticized, exploited, and appropriated, while Ground Zero remains the contested site of an effort at adequate commemoration.
In "9/11, "Simpson argues that...

Why has Anglo-American culture for so long regarded "theory" with intense suspicion? In this important contribution to the history of critical theory, David Simpson argues that a nationalist myth underlies contemporary attacks on theory. Theory's antagonists, Simpson shows, invoke the same criteria of common sense and national solidarity as did the British intellectuals who rebelled against "theory" and "method" during the French Revolution.
Simpson demonstrates the close association between "theory" and "method" and shows that by the mid-eighteenth century, "method" had acquired...

This brilliantly argued book is an entirely fresh critique of the postmodern turn. David Simpson sets his sights on the most distinctive aspects of postmodern scholarship: the pervasiveness of the literary and the flight from grand theory to local knowledge.
Simpson examines defining features of postmodern thought storytelling, autobiography, anecdote, and localism and traces their unacknowledged roots in literature and literary criticism. Considering such examples as the conversational turn in philosophy led by Richard Rorty and the anecdotal qualities of the New Historicism, he argues...

"Let me tell you where I'm coming from . . ."--so begins many a discussion in contemporary U.S. culture. Pressed by an almost compulsive desire to situate ourselves within a definite matrix of reference points (for example, "as a parent of two children" or "as an engineer" or "as a college graduate") in both scholarly inquiry and everyday parlance, we seem to reject adamantly the idea of a universal human subject. Yet what does this rhetoric of self-affiliation tell us? What is its history? David Simpson's "Situatedness" casts a critical eye on this currently popular form of identification,...

"Let me tell you where I'm coming from . . ."--so begins many a discussion in contemporary U.S. culture. Pressed by an almost compulsive desire to situate ourselves within a definite matrix of reference points (for example, "as a parent of two children" or "as an engineer" or "as a college graduate") in both scholarly inquiry and everyday parlance, we seem to reject adamantly the idea of a universal human subject. Yet what does this rhetoric of self-affiliation tell us? What is its history? David Simpson's "Situatedness" casts a critical eye on this currently popular form of identification,...

Treating the market economy as a complex adaptive system offers a better explanation of how it works than does the mechanical analogy of neoclassical equilibrium theory. The nonlinear interactions of millions of individual human beings, coupled with the influence of chance, result in the emergence of markets. Other regularities emerge in the patterns of economic growth, business cycles and in the spatial locations of economic activity. Rethinking Economic Behaviour demonstrates the implication of complexity theory for business and government decision-making, and concludes with an assessment...

This exceptional 1988 book provides a comprehensive anthology in English of the major texts of German literary and aesthetic theory between Lessing and Hegel.