In Hiding from History, Meili Steele challenges an assumption at the heart of current debates in political, literary, historical, and cultural theory: that it is impossible to reason through history. Steele believes that two influential schools of contemporary thought "hide from history": liberal philosophies of public reason as espoused by such figures as Jurgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, and John Rawls and structuralism/poststructuralism as practiced by Judith Butler, Hayden White, and Michel Foucault. For Steele, public reasoning cannot be easily divorced from either the historical imagination in general or the specific legacies that shape, and often haunt, political communities.Steele introduces the concept of public imagination concepts, images, stories, symbols, and practices of a culture to show how the imaginative social space that citizens inhabit can be a place for political discourse and debate. Steele engages with a wide range of thinkers and their works, as well as historical events: debates over the display of the Confederate flag in public places; Ralph Ellison's exchange with Hannah Arendt over school desegregation in Little Rock; the controversy surrounding Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners; and arguments about the concept of a "clash of civilizations" as expressed by Samuel Huntington, Ashis Nandy, Edward Said, and Amartya Sen. Championing history and literature's capacity to articulate the politics of public imagination, Hiding from History boldly outlines new territory for literary and political theory."

This book addresses the central crisis in critical theory today: how to theorise the subject as both a construct of oppressive discourse and a dialogical agent. By engaging with a wide range of leading political, philosophical, and critical thinkers - Jameson, Habermas, MacIntyre, Rorty, Taylor, Benhabib, and West are all critiqued - Meili Steele proposes linking language with human agency in order to develop an alternative textual and ethical theory of the subject. Steele shows how constructivist theories of agency fail to account for the ethical implications of the supposed contingency of all contexts, and how dialogical theorists fail to acknowledge the insight of postmodern critiques. Developing this theory through readings of texts that address issues of identity, politics, race, and feminist theory, Steele illustrates that we do not have to choose between an idealised or demonised modernity.

This book addresses the central crisis in critical theory today: how to theorise the subject as both a construct of oppressive discourse and a dialogical agent. By engaging with a wide range of leading political, philosophical, and critical thinkers - Jameson, Habermas, MacIntyre, Rorty, Taylor, Benhabib, and West are all critiqued - Meili Steele proposes linking language with human agency in order to develop an alternative textual and ethical theory of the subject. Steele shows how constructivist theories of agency fail to account for the ethical implications of the supposed contingency of all contexts, and how dialogical theorists fail to acknowledge the insight of postmodern critiques. Developing this theory through readings of texts that address issues of identity, politics, race, and feminist theory, Steele illustrates that we do not have to choose between an idealised or demonised modernity.

Joins heretofore separate realms to provide a new, more cohesive story of critical theory "An illuminating and cogent re-thinking of critical theory.... By an elegant and inclusive logic, (Steele) recasts tradition, the villain in many contemporary cultural scenarios, as the heroic defender and restorer of democratic ideals". -- Carol L. Bernstein, Bryn Mawr College

Critical Confrontations extends beyond the encyclopedia-like treatment found in most introductory volumes to broaden the interpretive landscape of critical theory and increase its usefulness. Contending that the dominant paradigms of contemporary critical theory eclipse rather than enable the analysis of gender, race, and difference that lies at the heart of today's cultural reflection, Meili Steele marshals the resources needed to draw tradition-based views of language and anti-humanistic theories from their abstract frameworks into the more tangible field of cultural studies.

Beginning with the debate between New Criticism and historical intentionalism, Steele charts a course through hermeneutics, dialogue, explanation, interpretation, poststructuralism, feminism, democracy, and the antinomies of exile and rootedness. He pairs comparable theorists and reviews the interpretive lenses they employ, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each theorist and text. Weaving a progressive narrative in which each chapter builds upon the preceding, Steele enables the reader to work through a developing dialogue rather than a list of theories. He also illumines the ways in which seemingly disparate theories can interact to address the questions that face teachers and students of literature, cultural studies, andphilosophy.

Steele renders perceptive analyses of contemporary theory's major thinkers, including Seyla Benhabib, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jessica Benjamin, Judith Butler, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jurgen Habermas, Cornel West, and Edward Said. He also considers the work of such important contemporary, writers as Marie Cardinal, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, and Susan Glaspell.

In Realism and the Drama of Reference, Meili Steele brings the problem of reference--how language discloses the world--into contemporary critical debates about representation. He explores the potential of reference in the work of three authors in the realistic tradition: Balzac, Flaubert, and James. By defining realism in terms of linguistic practices instead of representational accuracy, this study liberates reference from traditional realist concerns with the empirical universe. Realism thus becomes only one kind of referential practice.

The analysis takes up one text by each author--Balzac's Les Illusions perdues, Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, and James's The Golden Bowl--and considers each with regard to four problems of the realistic novel: the creation of physical and cultural space; the speech of the characters and the relationship of their speech to what the text suggests knowledge to be; the narrator's authority and his interventions; and the representation of the protagonist's experience. By mapping the representational strategies of these three major authors in the history of the novel, this study calls for a reconsideration of the ways in which all novels represent their worlds.