How ironic, the author thought on learning of the Sandinista's electoral defeat, that at its death the Revolutionary State left Woman, Violeta Chamorro, located at the center. The election signaled the end of one transition and the beginning of another, with Woman somewhere on the border between the neo-liberal and marxist projects. It is such transitions that Ileana Rodriguez takes up here, unraveling their weave of gender, ethnicity, and nation as it is revealed in literature written by women. In "House/Garden/Nation" the narratives of five Centro-Caribbean writers illustrate these times...
How ironic, the author thought on learning of the Sandinista's electoral defeat, that at its death the Revolutionary State left Woman, Violeta Chamorr...
Television can be imagined in a number of ways: as a profuse flow of images, as a machine that produces new social relationships, as the last lingering gasp of Western metaphysical thinking, as a stuttering relay system of almost anonymous messages, as a fantastic construction of time. Richard Dienst engages each of these possibilities as he explores the challenge television has posed for contemporary theories of culture, technology, and media. Five theoretical projects provide "Still Life in Real Time" with its framework: the cultural studies tradition of Raymond Williams; Marxist...
Television can be imagined in a number of ways: as a profuse flow of images, as a machine that produces new social relationships, as the last lingerin...
In "Belated Travelers," Ali Behdad offers a compelling cultural critique of nineteenth-century travel writing and its dynamic function in European colonialism. Arriving too late to the Orient, at a time when tourism and colonialism had already turned the exotic into the familiar, late nineteenth-century European travelers to the Middle East experienced a sense of belatedness, of having missed the authentic experience once offered by a world that was already disappearing. Behdad argues that this nostalgic desire for the other contains an implicit critique of Western superiority, a split within...
In "Belated Travelers," Ali Behdad offers a compelling cultural critique of nineteenth-century travel writing and its dynamic function in European col...
Although "objectivity" is a term used widely in many areas of public discourse, from discussions concerning the media and politics to debates over political correctness and cultural literacy, the question "What is objectivity?" is often ignored, as if the answer were obvious. In this volume, Allan Megill has gathered essays from fourteen leading scholars in a variety of fields--history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, history of science, sociology of science, feminist studies, literary studies, and accounting--to gain critical understanding of the idea of objectivity as it functions in...
Although "objectivity" is a term used widely in many areas of public discourse, from discussions concerning the media and politics to debates over pol...
How do men imagine women? In the poetry of Petrarch and his English successors--Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell--the male poet persistently imagines pursuing a woman, Laura, whom he pursues even as she continues to deny his affections. Critics have long held that, in objectifying Laura, these male-authored texts deny the imaginative, intellectual, and physical life of the woman they idealize. In "Laura," Barbara L. Estrin counters this traditional view by focusing not on the generative powers of the male poet, but on the subjectivity of the imagined woman and the imaginative space of the poems she...
How do men imagine women? In the poetry of Petrarch and his English successors--Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell--the male poet persistently imagines pursuin...
"Postmodernity in Latin America" contests the prevailing understanding of the relationship between postmodernity and Latin America by focusing on recent developments in Latin American, and particularly Argentine, political and literary culture. While European and North American theorists of postmodernity generally view Latin American fiction without regard for its political and cultural context, Latin Americanists often either uncritically apply the concept of postmodernity to Latin American literature and society or reject it in an equally uncritical fashion. The result has been both a...
"Postmodernity in Latin America" contests the prevailing understanding of the relationship between postmodernity and Latin America by focusing on rece...
Kant's philosophy is often treated as a closed system, without reference to how it was written or how Kant arrived at its familiar form, the critique. In fact, the style of the critique seems so artless that readers think of it as an unfortunate by-product--a style of stylelessness. In "Constituting Critique," Willi Goetschel shows how this apparent gracelessness was deliberately achieved by Kant through a series of writing experiments. By providing an account of the process that culminated in his three "Critiques," this book offers a new perspective on Kant's philosophical thought and...
Kant's philosophy is often treated as a closed system, without reference to how it was written or how Kant arrived at its familiar form, the critique....
Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as reflected in British novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the concept of class shame, she produces a model of working-class subjectivity that understands resistance in a more accurate and useful way--as a complicated kind of refusal, directed at both dominated and dominant culture. With a focus on...
Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this...
In "The Errant Art of "Moby-Dick, one of America's most distinguished critics reexamines Melville's monumental novel and turns the occasion into a meditation on the history and implications of canon formation. In "Moby-Dick"--a work virtually ignored and discredited at the time of its publication--William V. Spanos uncovers a text remarkably suited as a foundation for a "New Americanist" critique of the ideology based on Puritan origins that was codified in the canon established by "Old Americanist" critics from F. O. Matthiessen to Lionel Trilling. But Spanos also shows, with the novel still...
In "The Errant Art of "Moby-Dick, one of America's most distinguished critics reexamines Melville's monumental novel and turns the occasion into a med...
She's skinny, white, and blond. She's Barbie--an icon of femininity to generations of American girls. She's also multiethnic and straight--or so says Mattel, Barbie's manufacturer. But, as "Barbie's Queer Accessories "demonstrates, many girls do things with Barbie never seen in any commercial. Erica Rand looks at the corporate marketing strategies used to create Barbie's versatile (She's a rapper She's an astronaut She's a bride ) but nonetheless premolded and still predominantly white image. Rand weighs the values Mattel seeks to embody in Barbie--evident, for example, in her improbably...
She's skinny, white, and blond. She's Barbie--an icon of femininity to generations of American girls. She's also multiethnic and straight--or so says ...