Elegy for Theory

D. N. Rodowick

“This is a remarkable book: massively ambitious, brilliantly erudite, and exceptionally lucid. As a companion book to the earlier The Virtual Life of Film, it extends the argument of that first book to demonstrate the centrality and importance of an aesthetic philosophy for the arts and humanities and particularly for cinema studies. Elegy for Theory offers a flexible, informed, and convincing perspective on the past and future of film theory—a magnificent book.”—Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania

“Elegy for Theory is an important intervention into the debate about the role and nature of theory in film studies and, more broadly, the humanities. This book should be required reading for film scholars, and will be of interest to all those interested in the nature of humanistic scholarship.”—Thomas Wartenberg, Mt. Holyoke College

“Rodowick’s project is not merely to make yet another intervention in the often rhetorically-charged debates in favor of or against ‘theory’ that have occupied, divided, and haunted scholars across the humanities in the last decades. Instead, he opens the space for a historical, intellectual, and philosophical journey in quest of the ‘senses of theory’ that is simultaneously an ethical and political commitment to a specific vision of what the humanities are and should continue to be in the twenty-first century.”—Paola Marrati, Johns Hopkins University