This is a gem of a book. Its topics are timely and provocative for cultural studies, sociology, English, literary theory, and education classes. The authors are brilliant thinkers and clear, penetrating writers. - Peter McLaren, UCLA, author of Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire. Class in Culture demonstrates the power of moving beyond cultural politics to a deeper class critique of contemporary life. Making a persuasive case for class as the material logic of culture, the book is written in a double register of short critiques of life practices - from food and education to race, stem-cell research, and abortion - as well as sustained critiques of such theoretical discourses as ideology, consumption, globalization, and 9/11. Surpassing the orthodoxies of cultural studies, Class in Culture makes surprising connections among seemingly unrelated cultural events and practices and offers a groundbreaking and complex understanding of the contemporary world.

"A gem of a book. Its topics are timely and provocative for cultural studies, sociology, English, literary theory, and education classes. The authors are brilliant thinkers and clear, penetrating writers." -Peter McLaren, UCLA, author of Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire Class in Culture demonstrates the power of moving beyond cultural politics to a deeper class critique of contemporary life. Making a persuasive case for class as the material logic of culture, the book is written in a double register of short critiques of life practices-from food and education to race, stem-cell research, and abortion-as well as sustained critiques of such theoretical discourses as ideology, consumption, globalization, and 9/11. Surpassing the orthodoxies of cultural studies, Class in Culture makes surprising connections among seemingly unrelated cultural events and practices and offers a groundbreaking and complex understanding of the contemporary world.

In this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness. Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts ""the future belongs to ghosts."" Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not ""hauntology"" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to ""Chick Lit,"" from Lukacs, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Zizek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.