- Affective Mapping
- Hardcover 2008
- At Home in the World
- Timothy Brennan's passionate book is a bracing critique of the critical self-indulgence that calls itself cosmopolitanism. Brennan traces his subject from George Orwell to Julia Kristeva, from "third world" writing to the Nobel Prize. A critical call to arms, At Home in the World strips the false and heedless from the new cosmopolitanism in order to revitalize the idea.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover 1997
- Augustine the Reader
- Augustine of Hippo, a central figure in the history of Western thought, is also the author of a theory of reading that has had a profound influence on Western letters from the ages of Petrarch, Montaigne, Luther, and Rousseau to Freud and our own time. Brian Stock provides the first full account of this theory within the evolution of Augustine's early dialogues, his Confessions, and his systematic treatises.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
- Belief and Resistance
- What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when the ideas of truth, reason and objectivity are rejected? This question is at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists." Barbara Herrnstein Smith here examines the debate across a wide range of disciplines and through important and ongoing controversies.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover 1997
- Feeling in Theory
- This revolutionary work transforms the interdisciplinary debate on emotion by suggesting a positive relation between the "death of the subject" and the very existence of emotion. Reading the writings of Derrida and de Man, Terada finds grounds for construing emotion as nonsubjective.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
- Finding a Replacement for the Soul
- Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship.
- Hardcover 2004
- Homos
- Acclaimed for his intricate, incisive, and often controversial explorations of art, literature, and society, Leo Bersani now addresses homosexuality in modern culture. In his chapters on contemporary queer theory, on Foucault and psychoanalysis, on the politics of sadomasochism, and on the image of "the gay outlaw" in works by Gide, Proust, and Genet, Bersani raises the exciting possibility that same-sex desire by its very nature can disrupt oppressive social orders.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1996
- Inhuman Conditions
- Through an examination of debates about cosmopolitanism and human rights, Inhuman Conditions questions key ideas about what it means to be human. Cheah links influential arguments about the new cosmopolitanism to a perceptive examination of the older cosmopolitanism of Kant and Marx, and juxtaposes them with proliferating formations of collective culture to reveal the flaws in claims about the imminent decline of the nation-state and the obsolescence of popular nationalism.
- Paperback 2007 / Hardcover 2007
- The Juridical Unconscious
This book offers a groundbreaking account of the surprising interaction between trauma and justice. Moving from texts by Arendt, Benjamin, Freud, Zola, and Tolstoy to the Dreyfus and Nuremberg trials, as well as the trials of O. J. Simpson and Adolf Eichmann, Shoshana Felman argues that the adjudication of collective traumas in the twentieth century transformed both culture and law. This transformation took place through legal cases that put history itself on trial, and that provided a stage for the expression of the persecuted--the historically "expressionless."
- Paperback 2002 / Hardcover 2002
- Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value
- Hardcover 1989
- The Material Unconscious
- Within the ephemera of the everyday--old photographs, circus posters, iron toys--lies a challenge to America's dominant cultural memory. What this memory has left behind, Brown recovers in the "material unconscious" of Stephen Crane's work, the textual residues of daily sensations that add up to a new history of the American 1890s. As revealed in Crane's disavowing appropriation of an emerging mass culture--from football games and freak shows to roller coasters and early cinema--the decade reappears as an underexposed moment in the genealogy of modernism and modernity.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1997
- Modern Enchantments
- Magic, During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts--and by "magic," During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows--affect people?
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004
- The Open Work
- This book remains significant for its powerful concept of "openness"--the artist's decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance--and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.
- Hardcover 1989 / Paperback
- Premises
- "Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general.
- Hardcover 1997
- Renaissance Genres
- Hardcover 1986 / Paperback
- Resemblance and Disgrace
- By restoring the poet's image to view against the cultural background that branded it as monstrous, Deutsch recasts Pope's literary career as a form of monstrous embodiment--a stamping of his own image on fragments of the cultural past.
- Hardcover 1996
- The Return of Thematic Criticism
- Hardcover 1993 / Paperback
- The Secular Scripture
- Frye discerns in the innumerable romantic narratives of the Western tradition an imaginative universe stretching from an idyllic world to a demonic one, and a pattern of action taking the form of a cyclical descent into and ascent out of the demonic realm. Romance as a whole is thus seen as forming an integrated vision of the world, a "secular scripture" whose hero is man, paralleling the sacred scripture whose hero is God.
- Hardcover 1973 / Paperback
- Sexual Violence and American Manhood
- In materials as diverse as Hannah Foster's post-Revolutionary War novel The Coquette and the Coen brothers' 1996 movie Fargo, this book taps into popular culture and high art alike to outline the logic of American manhood's violent streak--and its dire consequences for a culture with truly democratic and egalitarian ambitions.
- Hardcover 2002
- Strange Dislocations
- Strange, deformed, and piercingly beautiful, the child acrobat Mignon sprang onto the public stage in 1795. No child at all, but a figment of Goethe's fiction, Mignon appeared and reappeared in countless forms and guises over the next century. The meaning of this compelling creature is at the center of Carolyn Steedman's book, a brilliant account of how nineteenth-century notions of childhood gave birth to the modern idea of a self.
- Hardcover 1998
- Theoretical Issues in Literary History
- Paperback 1991 / Hardcover 1991
- Thin Culture, High Art
- In the early-nineteenth-century a perceived absence of literature in Russia and America gave rise to grandiose notions of literature's importance. This book examines how two traditions worked to refigure cultural lack, not by disputing it but by insisting on it, by representing the nation's (putative) cultural deficit as a moral and aesthetic advantage. Through a comparative study of Gogol and Hawthorne, this book examines parallels that seem particularly striking when we consider that these traditions had virtually no points of contact.
- Paperback 2007 / Hardcover 2007
- Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926
- This first volume shows that even as a young man Benjamin possessed astonishing intellectual range and depth. His topics here include poetry and fiction, drama, philosophy, history, religion, love, violence, morality, mythology, painting, and much more. He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children's books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as symbolic logic or epistemology.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 2004
- Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930
- In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin emerged as the most original public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.
- Paperback 2005
- Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934
- Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.
- Paperback 2005
- Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940
- This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art adapts to survive and thrive in an age of violence and repression. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern," for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006
- Weird English
- Weird English explores experimental and unorthodox uses of English by multilingual writers traveling from the canonical works of Nabokov and Hong Kingston to the less critiqued linguistic terrain of Junot Díaz and Arundhati Roy. Ch'ien looks at how the collision of other languages with English invigorated and propelled the evolution of language in the twentieth century and beyond.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2005
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
- Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting.
- Paperback 2008
- The World Republic of Letters
- In this book, Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements--a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary "melting pot," Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- The World, the Text, and the Critic
- Said demonstrates that modern critical discourse has been impressively strengthened by the writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, for example, and by such influences as Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. He argues, however, that the various methods and schools have had a crippling effect through their tendency to force works of literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring the complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.
- Hardcover 1983 / Paperback