Download or read book The Task of Cultural Critique written by Teresa L. Ebert and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness. Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.
Download or read book Force Fields written by Martin Jay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Force Fields collects the recent essays of Martin Jay, an intellectual historian and cultural critic internationally known for his extensive work on the history of Western Marxism and the intellectual migration from Germany to America.
Download or read book Criticism and Culture written by Robert Con Davis and published by Pearson. This book was released on 1991 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critique and culture; the function of criticism - humanism and critique; the psychoanalytic critique of the subject; structuralism, semiotics and the critique of language; deconstruction, post-structuralism and the critique of philosophy; the critique of social relations; notes towards a definition of cultural studies.
Download or read book Anthropology as Cultural Critique written by George E. Marcus and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-12-10 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using cultural anthropology to analyze debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at cultural anthropology's past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction, and the insights it has to offer other fields of study. The result is a provocative work that is important for scholars interested in a critical approach to social science, art, literature, and history, as well as anthropology. This second edition considers new challenges to the field which have arisen since the book's original publication.
Download or read book On Criticism written by Noel Carroll and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a recent poll of practicing art critics, 75 percent reported that rendering judgments on artworks was the least significant aspect of their job. This is a troubling statistic for philosopher and critic Noel Carroll, who argues that that the proper task of the critic is not simply to describe, or to uncover hidden meanings or agendas, but instead to determine what is of value in art. Carroll argues for a humanistic conception of criticism which focuses on what the artist has achieved by creating or performing the work. Whilst a good critic should not neglect to contextualize and offer interpretations of a work of art, he argues that too much recent criticism has ignored the fundamental role of the artist's intentions. Including examples from visual, performance and literary arts, and the work of contemporary critics, Carroll provides a charming, erudite and persuasive argument that evaluation of art is an indispensable part of the conversation of life.
Download or read book Cultural Criticism Literary Theory Poststructuralism written by Vincent B. Leitch and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leitch argues for the use of poststructural theory in cultural criticism. He maintains that deconstruction remains crucial for a truly critical approach to cultural studies.
Download or read book The Limits of Critique written by Rita Felski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do critics feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What is the rationale for their conviction that language is always withholding some important truth, that the critic's task is to unearth what is unsaid, naturalized, or repressed? These are the features of critique, a mode of thought that thoroughly dominates academic criticism. In this book, Rita Felski brilliantly exposes critique's more troubling qualities and proposes alternatives to it. Critique, she argues, is not just a method but also a sensibility--one best captured by Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion." As the characteristic affect of critique, suspicion, Felski shows, helps us understand critique's seductions and limitations. The questions that Felski poses about critique have implications well beyond intramural debates among literary scholars. Literary studies, says Felski, is facing a legitimation crisis thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves the field struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? For Felski, the tendencies to make literary texts the object of suspicious reading or, conversely, impute to them qualities of critique, forecloses too many other possibilities. Felski offers an alternative model that she calls "postcritical reading." Rather than looking behind the text for its hidden causes, conditions, and motives, she suggests that literary scholars place themselves in front of a text, reflecting on what it calls forth and makes possible. Here Felski enlists the work of Bruno Latour to rethink reading as a co-production between actors, rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking. As a scholar with an abiding respect for theory who has long deployed elements of critique in her own work, Felski is able to provide an insider's account of critique's limits and alternatives that will resonate widely in the humanities.
Download or read book Rethinking the Frankfurt School written by Jeffrey T. Nealon and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reexamination of key Frankfurt School thinkers—Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse—in the light of contemporary theory and cultural studies across the disciplines, Rethinking the Frankfurt School asks what consequences such a rethinking might have for study of the Frankfurt School on its own terms. Ironically, contemporary theorists find themselves turning back toward the Frankfurt School precisely for the reasons it was once scorned: for a notion of subjects whose desires are less liberated and multiplied than they are produced and regulated by a far-reaching, very-nearly totalizing global culture industry. Indeed, as new questions concerning globalization and economic redistribution emerge, while analyses of identity politics and subjective transgression become less central to contemporary theory and cultural studies, the future of the Frankfurt School looks as promising and productive as its past has proven to be.
Download or read book The Function of Criticism at the Present Time written by Matthew Arnold and published by . This book was released on 1895 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Theology as Cultural Critique written by Jonathan R. Wilson and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Culture Inculturation and Theologians written by Gerald A. Arbuckle and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The split between the Gospel and culture is without doubt the drama of our time," wrote Paul VI in 1975. Since that time there has been an increasingly urgent awareness that inculturation is an indispensable task of the church. But inculturation, the dialogue between church and cultures, demands first of all that we who would enter into the dialogue understand what "culture" itself means and what dialogue entails. To that end, cultural anthropologist Father Gerald Arbuckle gives us this important volume. He traces the history of the development of the concept of culture, and the too-often negative, rarely positive effects of encounters between church and culture. He explores how Jesus Christ approached the cultures of his time, and outlines the current treatment of culture and inculturation in church documents and in Catholic theology. He shows that modest progress in understanding has recently staled, and there are even forces working to turn that progress into regress. He concludes with a description of inculturation as it needs to happen 'and a sharp critique of those who resist. With a sense of prophetic hope, Arbuckle seeks to help us bridge the lamentable split between Gospel and culture, the drama that continues to unfold in our time.
Download or read book Revolts in Cultural Critique written by Rosemarie Buikema and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centered around the relationship between art and political transformation. From Charlottë Bronte and Virginia Woolf, to Marlene van Niekerk and William Kentridge, artists and intellectuals have tried to address the question: How to deal with the legacy of exclusion and oppression? Via substantive works of art, this book examines some of the answers that have emerged to this question, to show how art can put into motion something new and how it can transform social and cultural relations in a sustainable way. In this way, art can function as an effective form of cultural critique. In the course of this book, a range of artworks are examined, through a postcolonial and feminist lens, in which revolt—both as a theme and as a medium-specific technique or/as critique —is made visible. Time and time again, revolt takes the form of a slow and thorough working through of the position of the individual in relation to her history and her contemporary geopolitical circumstances. It thus becomes evident that renewal and transformation in art and society are most successful when they proceed according to the method of self-reflexive cultural critique; when they do not present themselves as revolution, radical breaks with the past, but rather as processes of revolt in which knowledge of the past is investigated, complemented, corrected, and bent to a new collective will.
Download or read book Starting Over written by Judith Newton and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a decade Judith Newton has been at the forefront of defining and promoting materialist feminist criticism. Starting Over brings together a selection of her essays that chart the establishment of feminist literary criticism in the academy and its relation to other forms of cultural criticism, including Marxist, post-Marxist, new historicist, and cultural materialist approaches, as well as cultural studies. The essays in Starting Over have functioned as exemplars of interdisciplinary thinking, mapping out the ways in which reading strategies and the constructions of history, culture, identity, change, and agency in various materialist theories overlap, and the ways in which feminist-materialist work both draws upon, revises, and complicates the vision of nonfeminist materialist critiques. They are shaped by an awareness that public knowledge is always informed by the so-called private realm of familial and sexual relations and that cultural criticism must bring together investigations of daily behaviors, economic and social relations, and the dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexual struggle. Starting Over is a brilliant synthesis of literature, history, anthropology, the many influential trends in contemporary theory, and the politics of feminism.
Download or read book Why theory written by Edward Tomarken and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-17 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward Tomarken's previous book, Filmspeak, was a study of literary theory in relation to contemporary mainstream films. Some of the abstruse ideas of early literary theorists (1950–70) had in fact permeated our thinking to such an extent that both films and theories enriched and shed light upon one another. One early response to Filmspeak was the question 'Why theory?’, a remark that provides the title of this new and exciting exploration of literature. In pursuit of an answer, Tomarken turns to the 'second generation' of critics (1970–2000), and analyses television programmes as well as films. He considers scholars such as Clifford Geertz and Martha Nussbaum who saw themselves as working in the field of cultural studies. Why theory? thus has a dual focus – on both culture and literary theory. The result of integrating cultural ideas with media interpretation sees Tomarken grapple with the question of the title: theory has become a part of our cultural life.
Download or read book Critique and Praxis written by Bernard E. Harcourt and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical philosophy has always challenged the division between theory and practice. At its best, it aims to turn contemplation into emancipation, seeking to transform society in pursuit of equality, autonomy, and human flourishing. Yet today’s critical theory often seems to engage only in critique. These times of crisis demand more. Bernard E. Harcourt challenges us to move beyond decades of philosophical detours and to harness critical thought to the need for action. In a time of increasing awareness of economic and social inequality, Harcourt calls on us to make society more equal and just. Only critical theory can guide us toward a more self-reflexive pursuit of justice. Charting a vision for political action and social transformation, Harcourt argues that instead of posing the question, “What is to be done?” we must now turn it back onto ourselves and ask, and answer, “What more am I to do?” Critique and Praxis advocates for a new path forward that constantly challenges each and every one of us to ask what more we can do to realize a society based on equality and justice. Joining his decades of activism, social-justice litigation, and political engagement with his years of critical theory and philosophical work, Harcourt has written a magnum opus.
Download or read book Cultural Journalism and Cultural Critique in the Media written by Nete Nørgaard Kristensen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a topic in journalism studies that has gained increasing scholarly attention since the mid-2000s: the coverage and evaluation of arts and culture, or what we term ‘cultural journalism and cultural critique’. The book highlights three approaches to this emerging research field: (1) the constant challenge of demarcating what constitutes the ‘cultural’ in cultural journalism and cultural critique, and the interlinks of cultural journalism and cultural critique; (2) the dialectic of globalization’s cultural homogenization and the specificity of local/national cultures; and (3) the need to rethink, perhaps even redefine, cultural journalism and cultural critique in view of the digital media landscape. ‘Cultural journalism’ is used as an umbrella term for media reporting and debating on culture, including the arts, value politics, popular culture, the culture industries, and entertainment. Therefore some of the contributions this book apply a broad approach to ‘the cultural’ when theorizing and analyzing the production and content of cultural journalism, and the professional ideology, self-perception, and legitimacy struggles of cultural journalists and editors. Other contributions demarcate their field of study more narrowly, both topically and generically, by engaging with very specific sub-areas such as ‘film criticism’ or ‘television series.’ This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Practice.
Download or read book Cultural Criticism written by Arthur Asa Berger and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 1995 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Asa Berger's unique ability to translate difficult theories into accessible language makes this book an ideal introduction to cultural criticism. Berger covers the key theorists, concepts, and subject areas, from literary, sociological and psychoanalytical theories to semiotics and Marxism. Cultural Criticism breathes new life into the discipline by making these theories relevant to students' lives. The author illustrates his explanations with excerpts from classic works giving readers a sense of the important thinkers' styles and helping place them in their context. Berger also provides a comprehensive bibliography on cultural criticism for those who wish to explore the topics at greater length. Cultural Criticism is the perfect undergraduate supplemental text for such courses as media studies, literary criticism, and popular culture.
