Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas More's sixteenth-century work Utopia to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as a quintessential history of modernity. As he unravels the...
Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understan...
Through virtuoso readings of significant works of American film, television, and fiction, Phillip E. Wegner demonstrates that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 fostered a unique consciousness and represented a moment of immense historical possibilities now at risk of being forgotten in the midst of the "war on terror." Wegner argues that 9/11 should be understood as a form of what Jacques Lacan called the "second death," an event that repeats an earlier "fall," in this instance the collapse of the Berlin Wall. By...
Through virtuoso readings of significant works of American film, television, and fiction, Phillip E. Wegner demonstrates that the period between the f...
For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literary and cultural theory. In "Periodizing Jameson, "Phillip E. Wegner builds upon Jameson s unique dialectical method to demonstrate the value of Jameson s tools periodization, the fourfold hermeneutic, and the Greimasian semiotic square, among others and to develop virtuoso readings of Jameson s own work and the history of the contemporary American university in which it unfolds.
Wegner shows how Jameson s work intervenes in particular social, cultural, and political situations, using his...
For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literary and cultural theory. In "Periodizing Jameson, "P...
