Historicizing Theory

by Herman, Peter C.

• ISBN13: 9780791459621
• ISBN10: 0791459624
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

Historicizing Theory provides the first serious examination of contemporary theory in relation to the various twentieth-century historical and political contexts out of which it emerged. Theory--a broad category that is often used to encompass theoretical approaches as varied as cleconstruction, New Historicism, and post colonialism--has often been derided as a mere "relic" of the 1960s. In order to move beyond such a simplistic assessment, the essays in this volume examine such important figures as Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt, and Edward Said, situating their work in a variety of contexts inside and outside of the 1960s, including World War 11, the Holocaust, the Algerian civil war, and the canon wars of the 1980s. In bringing us face-to-face with the history of theory, "Historicizing Theory recuperates history for theory and asks us to confront some of the central issues and problems in literary studies today.

Author Biography

Peter C. Herman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction: The Resistance to Historicizing Theory	p. 1
The Holocaust, French Poststructuralism, the American Literary Academy, and Jewish Identity Poetics	p. 17
Michel Foucault and the Specter of War	p. 49
Historicizing Paul de Man's Master Trope Prosopopeia: Belgium's Trauma of 1940, the Nazi Volkskorper, and Versions of the Allegorical Body Politic	p. 69
"Nostalgeria" and "Structure, Sign, Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"	p. 99
Jean Baudrillard and May '68: An Acoustic Archaeology	p. 113
Stephen Greenblatt's "X"-Files: The Rhetoric of Containment and Invasive Disease in "Invisible Bullets" and "The Sources of Soviet Conduct"	p. 137
New Historicizing the New Historicism; or, Did Stephen Greenblatt Watch the Evening News in Early 1968?	p. 159
The End of Culture	p. 191
Literature, Incorporated: Harold Bloom, Theory, and the Canon	p. 209
The Sixties, the New Left, and the Emergence of Cultural Studies in the United States	p. 235
The Postcolonial Godfather	p. 255
The Spectrality of the Sixties	p. 277
Afterword: Historicism and Its Limits	p. 301
Contributors	p. 315
Index	p. 319
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