In Body and Story, Richard Terdiman explores the tension between what might seem to be two fundamentally different ways of understanding the world: as physical reality and as representation in language. In demonstrating the complicated relationship between these two modes of being, he also presents a new bold approach to the problem of conflicts between irreconcilable but equally compelling theoretical ideas.

Enlightenment rationalism is most often understood as maintaining that words can meaningfully refer to and grasp things in the material world, while Postmodernism famously argues that nothing exists outside of language. Terdiman challenges this clean distinction, finding the early seeds of Postmodern doubt in the Enlightenment, and demonstrating the stubborn resistance of material reality -- particularly that of the body -- to language even today. Building on readings of works by 18th-century encyclopedist Denis Diderot and contemporary philosopher-icon Jacques Derrida, Terdiman argues that despite their genuine and profound opposition, a constant negotiation or mutual interrogation has always been taking place between these two world-views, even as the balance at times shifts to one side or the other. In analyzing these shifts he proposes a new model for understanding how seemingly unabridgeable theories legitimately coexist in our intellectual conception of the world, and he suggests a new ethics for managing this coexistence.

How should the project of cultural studies change for the twenty-first century? Does theory have general application? How should we evaluate revolutions? How should we define countries, like China, on the margins of modernity and post-modernity? Is a neo-orientalism emerging in today's world? These are questions Shaobo Xie and Wang Fengzhen ask a panel of North America's leading cultural critics. What emerges is a remarkable collection of interviews and dialogues that discuss culture, ideology, history, Marxism, modernity, post-modernity, post-colonialism, globalization, and the role of the university and the intellectual in today's society.

Discourse/Counter-Discourse is situated on the border between cultural history and literary criticism: combining the insights of Marxism and semiotics, it attempts to delineate the cultural function of texts. Focusing on France during a period of remarkable cultural, social, and political transformation, Richard Terdiman examines both the dominant bourgeois discourse novels, newspapers, and other mass forms of expression and the effort of intellectuals to devise counter-discourses to combat it."

For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literary and cultural theory. In "Periodizing Jameson, "Phillip E. Wegner builds upon Jameson's unique dialectical method to demonstrate the value of Jameson's tools--periodization, the fourfold hermeneutic, and the Greimasian semiotic square, among others--and to develop virtuoso readings of Jameson's own work and the history of the contemporary American university in which it unfolds.

Wegner shows how Jameson's work intervenes in particular social, cultural, and political situations, using his scholarship both to develop original explorations of nineteenth-century fiction, popular films, and other promiment theorists, and to examine the changing fortunes of theory itself. In this way, "Periodizing Jameson "casts new light on the potential of and challenges to humanist intellectual work in the present.

This book is about memory—about how the past persists into the present, and about how this persistence has been understood over the past two centuries. Since the French Revolution, memory has been the source of an intense disquiet. Fundamental cultural theories have sought to understand it, and have striven to represent its stresses.

In "Body and Story, " Richard Terdiman explores the tension between what might seem to be two fundamentally different ways of understanding the world: as physical reality and as representation in language. In demonstrating the complicated relationship between these two modes of being, he also presents a new bold approach to the problem of conflicts between irreconcilable but equally compelling theoretical ideas.

Enlightenment rationalism is most often understood as maintaining that words can meaningfully refer to and grasp things in the material world, while Postmodernism famously argues that nothing exists outside of language. Terdiman challenges this clean distinction, finding the early seeds of Postmodern doubt in the Enlightenment, and demonstrating the stubborn resistance of material reality--particularly that of the body--to language even today. Building on readings of works by 18th-century encyclopedist Denis Diderot and contemporary philosopher-icon Jacques Derrida, Terdiman argues that despite their genuine and profound opposition, a constant negotiation or mutual interrogation has always been taking place between these two world-views, even as the balance at times shifts to one side or the other. In analyzing these shifts he proposes a new model for understanding how seemingly unabridgeable theories legitimately coexist in our intellectual conception of the world, and he suggests a new ethics for managing this coexistence.