Cultural Semantics

by Jay, Martin

• ISBN13: 9781558491168
• ISBN10: 1558491163
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr

Summary

A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter - and about why ideas matter. Borrowing from Flaubert's notion of a dictionary of "received ideas" and Raymond Williams's explorations of the "keywords" of the modern age, Jay investigates some of the central concepts by which we currently organize our thoughts and lives. His topics range from "theory" and "experience" to the meaning of "multiculturalism" and the dynamics of cultural "subversion." Among the thinkers he engages are Bataille and Foucault, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Christa Wolf.
By looking closely at what "words do and perform," Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. By helping to distance us from much that we now take for granted, he makes it difficult for us to remain comfortably certain about what we think we know.

Author Biography

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
For Theory	p. 15
European Intellectual History and the Specter of Multiculturalism	p. 31
Songs of Experience: Reflections on the Debate over Alltagsgeschichte	p. 37
Experience without a Subject: Walter Benjamin and the Novel	p. 47
The Limits of Limit-Experience: Bataille and Foucault	p. 62
No Power to the Soviets	p. 79
Who's Afraid of Christa Wolf? Thoughts on the Dynamics of Cultural Subversion	p. 85
Postmodern Fascism? Reflections on the Return of the Repressed	p. 94
Educating the Educators	p. 102
The Aesthetic Alibi	p. 109
Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe	p. 120
The Academic Woman as Performance Artist	p. 138
Abjection Overruled	p. 144
The Uncanny Nineties	p. 157
Modernism and the Specter of Psychologism	p. 165
Modern and Postmodern Paganism: Peter Gay and Jean-Francois Lyotard	p. 181
The Manacles of Gavrilo Princip	p. 197
Notes	p. 205
Index	p. 251
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