|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
Through close engagement with the work of Wordsworth, Austen, and
Byron, The History of Missed Opportunities posits that the everyday
first emerged as a distinct category of experience, or first became
thinkable, in the Romantic period. Conceived here as something
overlooked and only noticed in retrospect, the everyday not only
becomes subject matter for Romanticism, it also structures Romantic
poetry, prose, and writing habits. Because the everyday is not
noticed the first time around, it comes to be thought of as a
missed opportunity, a possible world that was not experienced or
taken advantage of and of whose history—or lack thereof—writers
become acutely conscious. Consciousness of the everyday also
entails a new relationship to time, as the Romantics turn to the
history of what might have been. In recounting Romanticism's
interest in making things recurrently present, in recovering a past
of what was close at hand yet underappreciated, William H. Galperin
positions the Romantics as precursors to twentieth-century thinkers
of the everyday, including Heidegger, Benjamin, Lefebvre, and
Cavell. He attends to Romantic discourse that works at cross
purposes with standard accounts of both Romanticism and Romantic
subjectivity. Instead of individualizing or turning inward, the
Romantics' own discourse depersonalizes or exhibits a confrontation
with thing-ness and the material world.
On the current battlefield of cultural criticism and production, no
term has been more vigorously contested than 'postmodernism'.
Defying clear definition, yet persisting as an indispensable
category, it has become one of the central topics in the theory and
practice of contemporary culture. Postmodernism and Its Discontents
collects some of the major theoretical statements in this debate,
including the key intervention of Fredric Jameson, and pits them
against original contributions by a range of younger writers who
explore the terrain of postmodernism in a variety of cultural
practices. Essays on poetry and punk culture, recent American
fiction, rock videos, Hollywood and foreign film, and sports and
soap operas complement more directly theoretical pieces which
tackle, to repeat the title of one essay, 'what is at stake in the
debate on postmodernism.' Above all, this collection is
distinguished by its steadfast refusal to elide the determinate
political issues posed by postmodernism. Each of the essays insists
upon the materiality of cultural production, locating various
post-modernist practices in the social conditions of contemporary
life, including the overarching structures of gender and class.
|
|