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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > Postmodernism > Structuralism, deconstruction, post-structuralism
This study illuminates the complex interplay between Deleuze and
Guattari's philosophy and architecture. Presenting their
wide-ranging impact on late 20th- and 21st-century architecture,
each chapter focuses on a core Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophical
concept and one key work of architecture which evokes, contorts, or
extends it. Challenging the idea that a concept or theory defines
and then produces the physical work and not vice versa, Chris L.
Smith positions the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari's
philosophy and the field of architecture as one that is mutually
substantiating and constitutive. In this framework, modes of
architectural production and experimentation become inextricable
from the conceptual territories defined by these two key thinkers,
producing a rigorous discussion of theoretical, practical, and
experimental engagements with their ideas.
Author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude,
Jonathan Lethem is one of the most celebrated and significant
American writers working today. This new scholarly study draws on a
deep knowledge of all Lethem's work to explore the range of his
writing, from his award-winning fiction to his work in comics and
criticism. Reading Lethem in relation to five themes crucial to his
work, Joseph Brooker considers influence and intertextuality; the
role of genres such as crime, science fiction and the Western; the
imaginative production of worlds; superheroes and comic book
traditions; and the representation of New York City. Close readings
of Lethem's fiction are contextualized by reference to broader
conceptual and comparative frames, as well as to Lethem's own
voluminous non-fictional writing and his adaptation of precursors
from Franz Kafka to Raymond Chandler. Rich in critical insight,
Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing demonstrates how an
understanding of this author illuminates contemporary literature
and culture at large.
Bare Architecture: a schizoanalysis, is a poststructural
exploration of the interface between architecture and the body.
Chris L. Smith skilfully introduces and explains numerous concepts
drawn from poststructural philosophy to explore the manner by which
the architecture/body relation may be rethought in the 21st
century. Multiple well-known figures in the discourses of
poststructuralism are invoked: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jorges Luis
Borges and Michel Serres. These figures bring into view the
philosophical frame in which the body is formulated. Alongside the
philosophy, the architecture that Smith comes to refer to as 'bare
architecture' is explored. Smith considers architecture as a
complex construction and the book draws upon literature, art and
music, to provide a critique of the limits, extents and
opportunities for architecture itself. The book considers key works
from the architects Douglas Darden, Georges Pingusson, Lacatan and
Vassal, Carlo Scarpa, Peter Zumthor, Marco Casagrande and Sami
Rintala and Raumlabor. Such works are engaged for their capacities
to foster a rethinking of the relation between architecture and the
body.
The future of deconstruction lies in the ability of its
practitioners to mobilise the tropes and interests of Derrida's
texts into new spaces and creative readings. In Deconstruction
without Derrida, Martin McQuillan sets out to do just that, to
continue the task of deconstructive reading both with and without
Derrida. The book's principal theme is an attention to instances of
deconstruction other than or beyond Derrida and thus imagining a
future for deconstruction after Derrida. This future is both the
present of deconstruction and its past. The readings presented in
this book address the expanded field of deconstruction in the work
of Jean-Luc Nancy, Helene Cixous, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, J.
Hillis Miller, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak and Catherine Malabou.
They also, necessarily, address Derrida's own readings of this
work. McQuillan accounts for an experience of otherness in
deconstruction that is, has been and always will be beyond Derrida,
just as deconstruction remains forever tied to Derrida by an
invisible, indestructible thread.
A Companion to Derrida is the most comprehensive single volume
reference work on the thought of Jacques Derrida. Leading scholars
present a summary of his most important accomplishments across a
broad range of subjects, and offer new assessments of these
achievements. * The most comprehensive single volume reference work
on the thought of Jacques Derrida, with contributions from highly
prominent Derrida scholars * Unique focus on three major
philosophical themes of metaphysics and epistemology; ethics,
religion, and politics; and art and literature * Introduces the
reader to the positions Derrida took in various areas of
philosophy, as well as clarifying how derrideans interpret them in
the present * Contributions present not only a summary of Derrida s
most important accomplishments in relation to a wide range of
disciplines, but also a new assessment of these accomplishments *
Offers a greater understanding of how Derrida s work has fared
since his death
This book synthesizes Jacques Derrida's hauntology and spectrality
with affect theory, in order to create a rhetorical framework
analyzing the felt absences and hauntings of written and oral
texts. The book opens with a history of hauntology, spectrality,
and affect theory and how each of those ideas have been applied.
The book then moves into discussing the unique elements of the
rhetorical framework known as the rhetorrectional situation. Three
case studies taken from the Christian tradition, serve to
demonstrate how spectral rhetoric works. The first is fictional,
C.S. Lewis 'The Great Divorce. The second is non-fiction, Tim
Jennings 'The God Shaped Brain. The final one is taken from
homiletics, Bishop Michael Curry's royal wedding 2018 sermon. After
the case studies conclusion offers the reader a summary and ideas
future applications for spectral rhetoric.
Drawing on poststructuralist approaches, Craig Martin outlines a
theory of discourse, ideology, and domination that can be used by
scholars and students to understand these central elements in the
study of culture. The book shows how discourses are used to
construct social institutions-often classist, sexist, or racist-and
that those social institutions always entail a distribution of
resources and capital in ways that capacitate some subject
positions over others. Such asymmetrical power relations are often
obscured by ideologies that offer demonstrably false accounts of
why those asymmetries exist or persist. The author provides a
method of reading in order to bring matters into relief, and the
last chapter provides a case study that applies his theory and
method to racist ideologies in the United States, which
systematically function to discourage white Americans from
sympathizing with poor African Americans, thereby contributing to
reinforcing the latter's place at the bottom of a racial hierarchy
that has always existed in the US.
Alienation After Derrida rearticulates the Hegelian-Marxist theory
of alienation in the light of Derrida's deconstruction of the
metaphysics of presence. Simon Skempton aims to demonstrate in what
way Derridian deconstruction can itself be said to be a critique of
alienation. In so doing, he argues that the acceptance of Derrida's
deconstructive concepts does not necessarily entail the acceptance
of his interpretations of Hegel and Marx. In this way the book
proposes radical reinterpretations, not only of Hegel and Marx, but
of Derridian deconstruction itself. The critique of the notions of
alienation and de-alienation is a key component of Derridian
deconstruction that has been largely neglected by scholars to date.
This important new study puts forward a unique and original
argument that Derridian deconstruction can itself provide the basis
for a rethinking of the concept of alienation, a concept that has
received little serious philosophically engaged attention for
several decades. >
This book offers an empirical and theoretical account of the mode
of governance that characterizes the Bologna Process. In addition,
it shows how the reform materializes and is translated in everyday
working life among professors and managers in higher education. It
examines the so-called Open Method of Coordination as a powerful
actor that uses "soft governance" to advance transnational
standards in higher education. The book shows how these standards
no longer serve as tools for what were once human organizational,
national or international, regulators. Instead, the standards have
become regulators themselves - the faceless masters of higher
education. By exploring this, the book reveals the close
connections between the Bologna Process and the EU regarding
regulative and monitoring techniques such as standardizations and
comparisons, which are carried out through the Open Method of
Coordination. It suggests that the Bologna Process works as a
subtle means to circumvent the EU's subsidiarity principle, making
it possible to accomplish a European governance of higher education
despite the fact that education falls outside EU's legislative
reach. The book's research interest in translation processes,
agency and power relations among policy actors positions it in
studies on policy transfer, policy borrowing and globalization.
However, different from conventional approaches, this study draws
on additional interpretive frameworks such as new materialism.
Derrida's claim that 'without deconstruction there can be no
responsible political thought' is one of his most provocative, and
one that even his most vocal admirers have been reluctant to
endorse fully. Deconstruction and Democracy evaluates and
substantiates Derrida's assertion, assessing the importance of this
eminent contemporary philosopher's work for political thought. From
the early 1980s onwards, Derrida has addressed political subjects
more and more explicitly; here Alex Thomson argues that the time
has come for a fresh understanding of deconstruction -- one that
acknowledges its relevance for, and potential contribution to,
political thinking. The book provides cogent analysis and exegesis
of Derrida's often rather abstruse and impenetrable political
writings; explores the implications for political theory and
practice of Derrida's work; and brings Derrida's work into dialogue
with other major strands of contemporary political thought.
Deconstruction and Democracy is the clearest and most detailed
engagement available with the politics of deconstruction, and is a
major contribution to scholarship on the later work of Jacques
Derrida, most notably his Politics of Friendship.
Roland Barthes - the author of such enduringly influential works as
Mythologies and Camera Lucida - was one of the most important
cultural critics of the post-war era. Since his death in 1980, new
writings have continued to be discovered and published. The
Afterlives of Roland Barthes is the first book to revisit and
reassess Barthes' thought in light of these posthumously published
writings. Covering work such as Barthes' Mourning Diary, the notes
for his projected Vita Nova and many writings yet to be translated
into English, Neil Badmington reveals a very different Barthes of
today than the figure familiar from the writings published in his
lifetime.
The twenty-first century has seen an increased awareness of the
forms of environmental destruction that cannot immediately be seen,
localised or, by some, even acknowledged. Ecocriticism on the Edge
explores the possibility of a new mode of critical practice, one
fully engaged with the destructive force of the planetary
environmental crisis. Timothy Clark argues that, in literary and
cultural criticism, the "Anthropocene", which names the epoch in
which human impacts on the planet's ecological systems reach a
dangerous limit, also represents a threshold at which modes of
interpretation that once seemed sufficient or progressive become,
in this new counterintuitive context, inadequate or even latently
destructive. The book includes analyses of literary works,
including texts by Paule Marshall, Gary Snyder, Ben Okri, Henry
Lawson, Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver.
This volume examines the interface between the teachings of art and
the art of teaching, and asserts the centrality of aesthetics for
rethinking education. Many of the essays in this collection claim a
direct connection between critical thinking, democratic dissensus,
and anti-racist pedagogy with aesthetic experiences. They argue
that aesthetics should be reconceptualized less as mere art
appreciation or the cultivation of aesthetic judgment of taste, and
more with the affective disruptions, phenomenological experiences,
and the democratic politics of learning, thinking, and teaching.
The first set of essays in the volume examines the unique
pedagogies of the various arts including literature, poetry, film,
and music. The second set addresses questions concerning the art of
pedagogy and the relationship between aesthetic experience and
teaching and learning. Demonstrating the flexibility and diversity
of aesthetic expressions and experiences in education, the book
deals with issues such as the connections between racism and
affect, curatorship and teaching, aesthetic experience and the
common, and studying and poetics. The book explores these topics
through a variety of theoretical and philosophical lenses including
contemporary post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology,
critical theory, and pragmatism.
Philosophy, Myth and Epic Cinema looks at the power of cinema in
creating ideas that inspire our culture. Sylvie Magerstadt
discusses the relationship between art, illusion and reality, a
theme that has been part of philosophical debate for centuries. She
argues that with the increase in use of digital technologies in
modern cinema, this debate has entered a new phase. She discusses
the notion of illusions as a system of stories and values that
inspire a culture similar to other grand narratives, such as
mythology or religion. Cinema thus becomes the postmodern
"mythmaking machine" par excellence in a world that finds it
increasingly difficult to create unifying concepts and positive
illusions that can inspire and give hope. The author draws on the
work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Siegfried Kracauer, and Gilles Deleuze
to demonstrate the relevance of continental philosophy to a reading
of mainstream Hollywood cinema. The book argues that our longing
for illusion is particularly strong in times of crisis, illustrated
through an exploration of the recent revival of historic and epic
myths in Hollywood cinema, including films such as Troy, The Lord
of the Rings Trilogy, and Clash of the Titans.
Written by Derrida scholars, philosophers, and classicists, Derrida
and Antiquity analyses a dialogue with the ancient world in the
work of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.
Through an analysis of Derrida's work it explores the relationship
between modern philosophy and Plato, the role ancient concepts of
democracy have played in modern political debates, and the place of
antiquity in contemporary discussions about Europe, as well as
investigating the influence that deconstruction has had on the
study of classical literature, ancient philosophy, and early
religion. The volume is prefaced by a previously untranslated essay
by Derrida, 'We Other Greeks'.
Levinas and Lacan, two giants of contemporary theory, represent
schools of thought that seem poles apart. In this major new work,
Mari Ruti charts the ethical terrain between them. At first glance,
Levinansian and Lacanian approaches may seem more or less
incompatible, and in many ways they are, particularly in their
understanding of the self-other relationship. For both Levinas and
Lacan, the subject's relationship to the other is primary in the
sense that the subject, literally, does not exist without the
other, but they see the challenge of ethics quite differently:
while Levinas laments our failure to adequately meet the ethical
demand arising from the other, Lacan laments the consequences of
our failure to adequately escape the forms this demand frequently
takes. Although this book outlines the major differences between
Levinas and Judith Butler on the one hand and Lacan, Slavoj Zizek,
and Alain Badiou on the other, Ruti proposes that underneath these
differences one can discern a shared concern with the thorny
relationship between the singularity of experience and the
universality of ethics. Between Levinas and Lacan is an important
new book for anyone interested in contemporary theory, ethics,
psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory.
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