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The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 10)

Jean-Francois Lyotard

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Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Post-Nuclear Philosophical Fallout 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

If, as William Barrett once remarked, existentialism is "philosophy for the atomic age," then the atomic age's look into the future - by way of Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition - is nothing short of a nightmarish vision of what post-nuclear philosophy would be like. If the Cold War was ultimately the product of two totalizing visions - the two remaining totalizing visions of the modern age, namely liberal democracy and socialism - locked into prolonged, agonizing conflict behind facades such as international diplomacy, then the postmodern condition is the worldview of a world brought back from the brink of total annihilation. Postmodernism, claims Lyotard at the beginning of his book, is "incredulity towards metanarratives" (xxiv). Rather than seeking a new way of understanding the world en toto - a new totalizing vision/metanarrative - the postmodern condition backs away from the philosophical One and seeks what it seeks - itself or, rather, the disparate fragments that indicate the existence of itself - among the philosophical Many. As Lyotard also writes, postmodernism "refines our sensitivity to differences" - the exact opposite of the totalitarian visions that caused so much death in the 20th century.

The Postmodern Condition is a work that is as fascinating as it is complicated. Lyotard is heavily interested in the question of legitimation - specifically, how knowledge is made and validated. What defines knowledge? One could, in many ways, see this work as fundamentally epistemological, for he spends a considerable amount of time in this work focusing on how it is that the university system, in particular, can survive if knowledge is both under the sway of the forces of capital and no longer considered emancipatory. I am not entirely sure if Lyotard wants a return to a pre-postmodern world; the book is written in such a straight, matter-of-fact style that it is hard to tell whether or not he is for or against that which he writes of. Perhaps there is some irony in the fact that he appears so disinterested in describing a worldview - or, perhaps better, an anti-worldview - in which the notion of disinterested knowledge or unbiased reporting is conceived as being nothing more than a fiction. If there is any irony here, it is of the driest sort.

There is a certain Marxist hue, however, to many of the analyses contained in these pages. The ability of economic interests to determine the shape of research in a university with the subsequent result that some knowledge is found to sell and other kinds aren't - that which sells is therefore seen as more legitimate than that which doesn't - causes Lyotard considerable concern. Rather than philosophy or metaphysics being seen as capable of validating claims - truth, he notes, is no longer the main concern - science proves itself by way of its functionality. What it does and how that makes life on earth better becomes the sine qua non of our own material interests - and knowledge is therefore conceived as material, rather than ideal/metaphysical. There is no meta-language game that serves as the ground for other games: what matters is what you can *do* with a particular type of research, or a given object. Science is thus isolated from other fields, just as philosophy is. There is no longer a "queen of the sciences." Knowledge, in a holistic sense, is thus fragmented and all is placed under the final sway of capital - or, more specifically, market forces. Lyotard's analysis is nothing short of brilliant.

Included as an appendix to the present volume is one of Lyotard's most widely re-published essays: "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" A short work - not quite 10 full pages in length - it is a perfect compliment to Lyotard's longer consideration of the matter. However, unlike the Report, the appendix deals little with the question of scientific knowledge, and much more with aesthetics. Whereas the Report is concerned with academia, the appendix turns towards popular culture, specifically fashion: "Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture" (76). Thus, the appendix can be scene as something like the popular counterpart to the more densely argued Report - popular in its focus, and in terms of the audience that it is geared to. Whether or not this means that postmodern philosophy is ultimately intended to leave the academy - the philosophical-institutional One - where knowledge cannot be validated and live, instead, among the philosophical-cultural Many remains a point of debate still today. Perhaps this is good reason for believing, then, that we do live in a postmodern age - and Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition remains as prescient (future anterior) for understanding that age as ever.

Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature With Critical Theory

Steven Lynn

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A great introductory text for AP English 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I use this book to introduce literary theory to my AP high school seniors. The explanations of the theories are accessible, the sample essays provide great models, and the suggested strategies for critical writing effectively allow my students to engage with both work and theory. Impressive... AND the author maintains a sense of humor which adds to the readability. Wow!

Editorial Review:

Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory provides an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theories from new criticism to cultural studies as part of the practice of writing about literature. Providing a wealth of writing strategies, the text explains the assumptions underlying the various critical theories, and then takes the readers through the process of employing these methods to enrich their engagements with literature. This 3rd Edition includes a new Chapter 1, An Introduction, Theoretically as well as updated coverage of research and the Internet. For anyone interested in enhancing their reading and writing skills through critical theory.

Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Villanueva provides a useful survey of composition theory. 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Victor Villanueva's text Cross-Talk provides readers with an important edited text incorporating the essential works of the field's major theorists. In doing so he appears to validate all of the theorists he represents in his text, however, if one examines the text it becomes clear that Villanueva privileges a rhetorical perspective, one which embeds learning to write in the social/cultural world, with the objective of preparing students to participate in democracy, and the desire for a more equitable world, as well as seeking justice and voices for the marginalized.

Regardless of any problems the text might have if it is read from other than an ideological perspective, the collection includes most of the truly important theorists of the past from Mina Shaughnessy's first book Errors and Expectations in 1977 to the present. A large book of 760 pages, it is unable to completely survey the many articles written about composition and does not pretend to do so. Villanueva suggests that this book is a beginning, a take off point from which readers can jump off and follow threads of thinking back to their originators and forward to their disciples.

I highly recommend Villanueva's book Cross-Talk to anyone interested in composition and composition theory. Even those people who are not already experts should find the text and its readings readily accessible, since it is both reasonably jargon-free and what terms are used are, for the most part, well defined.

The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends

David H. Richter

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Indispensable intro to any and all literary theory 5 out of 5 stars.
38 of 38 people found this review helpful.

Time and again, I've watched students--whether grads or undergrads--stress and strain in an attempt to get their heads around the thoughts of people like Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Spivak, etc. I've come to the conclusion that this confusion stems from the average university's habit of throwing new critical thinkers in at the contemporary deep-end of critical thinking. Richter's book is absolutely indispensable, as it is one of the few anthologies willing to acknowledge the existence of and include well-chosen examples from the long history of critical thought and how it helps us understand what we read, why we read, and what we value.

You could buy the Adams/Searle two-volume deal, split into critical theory before and after 1965, but you'll notice right away that the date they've arbitrarily chosen as their critical divide doesn't hold water. In order to introduce the post-1965 thinkers, Searle and Adams are forced to include a bevy of far earlier thinkers, from Heidegger to Lukacs to Wittgenstein. You're safer to stick with Richter, who lets the interconnectedness of these thinkers speak for itself.

The greatest strength of Richter's tome is that it simply starts at the beginning (which is, as Julie Andrews reminds us, a "very good place to start") and moves forward (until about the mid-19th century, when things get trickier), charting a course through what is aptly termed "the critical tradition." This movement provides an astonishingly broad context in which one can more usefully engage more contemporary thinkers. Present-day debates over representation, for example, and the dangers thereof, weigh a great deal more when one is familiar with the long history that underpins this debate, from Aristotle to Horace ("just representations of general nature") to Sidney, etc.

An unexpected bonus to this focus on thinkers other than those 20th-century bastions of critical theory, is a broader understanding of intellectual currents in other periods. Romanticism? You've got Kant, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge explaining it to you. The Enlightenment? You've got Johnson, Hume and Pope. The more context one has, the more one understands, in my experience.

I've harped on the critical tradition in Richter, but he has chosen the contemporary essays well, too. They're selected and organized in such a way as to give a sense of a debate taking shape. This not only helps the readings speak to each other more directly, but it also forces the reader to keep in mind that the critical tradition is never a finished product. Its construction continues, and by the end of a semester spent in Richter's anthology, we become a part of this development, feel its workings around and beyond us.

I highly recommend this volume.

Editorial Review:

The most comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory from Plato to the present, with a highly praised critical apparatus, including introductions, headnotes, bibliographies, and glosses.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium/the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-86 (Vintage International)

Italo Calvino

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Calvino manifesto 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This book is a collection of talks on writing Calvino was preparing as a series of documents specifying some important keys of literature that he felt needed to be recorded as crucial elements of literary tradition. Indeed, in his essay "Visibility," Calvino brings up his concern for the future of imagination and literature in a world so full of prefabricated imagery, where images are provided rather than solicited. While his initial impulse was to write six lectures, he evidently reported at one point of his process that he had ideas for eight, but in the end he only completed five. In her introduction, Esther Calvino clarifies that she decided to keep the title true to Italo's original intention and publish the series under the original title, despite the missing sixth.

In the lectures themselves, Calvino provides the kind of insight and fascination with the making of literature that fuels so many of his best books. Rather than come across as a manifesto of his own brilliance, as the premise may sound, Calvino spends a lot of time in admiration of the work of other writers, from classics like Ovid and Dante to colleagues and contemporaries, like Francis Perec and Douglas R. Hofstadter. The lectures are of course sometimes punctuated with personal details about his own writing processes, but I found them very inviting and revealing about the ideas he was trying to point out.

Each lecture dedicates itself to an aspect of literature that Calvino finds crucial: "Lightness," or the aspect of language that speaks directly to a reader and is not always weighed down with intellectual metaphor but with direct communication; "Quickness," or the immediacy of literature - the way it cuts through random detail to get to the necessary; "Exactitude," or the precision of language (and when it needs imprecision); "Visibility," or the power of imagery to convey ideas; and "Multiplicity," or the complexity of content.

Calvino is a writer who has always presented a kind of fascinating enigma. His works is spectacularly visual, and while crucially uncategorizable in its sense of being not easy to nail down in the area of metaphor or theme (something that Calvino no doubt worked quite strenuously at, clear when he talks about a poem's meaning in "Exactitude" as being "not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into mineral immobility, but alive as an organism"), it is also quite accessible and always an enjoyable read. Calvino mastered the art of experimentalism that did not read as though one needed to be schooled in the traditions of literature to understand his intents. Though Calvino clearly wants to offer his lectures as guides for the necessities of literature for posterity, it is also a manifesto on the man's own aesthetic, though it is not a manifesto that demands the agreement of others, or the demand that others follow in his footsteps. Though Calvino does have moments of criticism, as when he accuses schools of dispensing "the culture of the mediocre," which I take to mean the conveying of literature as something with set meaning that we must all learn and emulate (or at least parrot back), and also directs a barb or two at the publishing industry when he supports experimentalism with the following caveat: "The demands of the publishing business are a fetish that must not be allowed to keep us from trying out new forms." In this lecture series, Calvino presents himself quite wise and worldly, but also quite direct and earnest. A reading of this work at the start of any literature course on almost any level of schooling might provide a stiff reminder that literature is a work of passion, not just analysis, and it also works in the realm of paradox, as Calvino himself presents--that it is structure in literature that is needed to make it transcend structure, that one needs to be as aware of the lack of success in literature as much as success to see the stuff of great literature.

Calvino's last `memo,' "Consistency," was never written, but I could only imagine where he would have gone with it, which was always a strength of Calvino's work. The last lecture seems to bring to a full circle many of things he brings up through the series, but Calvino's work always found a way to extend beyond the full circle. Perhaps, in the end, the consistency needs to be ours, to make sure that this wisdom does not go to waste.

Editorial Review:

A series of lectures which Italo Calvino wrote in the final year of his life. Drawing on the works of Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Flaubert, Kundera, Perec and many more, he pinpoints the universal laws and literary values: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity.

On Dialogue (Routledge Classics)

David Bohm

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A very helpful book. 4 out of 5 stars.
9 of 16 people found this review helpful.

When you work with people, or as a matter of fact, when you live among people, as we all do, having some knowledge about how interactions work are essential. David Bohm's book On Dialoge is a very handy book on this topic.

In our world everything happens so fast, with modern technology, television, computers, air travel and sattelites. There is a network of communications which has influence on our everyday life. Just push a button and you are in contact with people from all over the world.

How we communicate is a question for all of us. And in On Dialogue David Bohm is helping us to at least find some answers.

The book enlightens topics as on communication, on dialogue, the nature of collective thoughts and many more. We read from the foreword: "Perhaps most importantly, dialogue explores the manner in witch thought is generated and sustained at the collective level."

Read this book, and you will learn alot about your own life, the life you are bond to live in interaction with people around you.

Britt Arnhild Lindland

Editorial Review:

On Dialogue is the most comprehensive documentation to date of best-selling author David Bohm's dialogical world view. Bohm explores the purpose, methods and meanings of the multi-faceted process he referred to simply as "dialogue", suggesting that dialogue offers the possibility of an entirely new order of communication and relationship with ourselves, our fellows, and the world around us.

Bohm's basic message is: if your views are correct, they do not need an aggressive defense; if they are incorrect they do not deserve it and realizing that is the beginning of dialogue. His book offers tools that facilitate a true exchange of ideas between people.

Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature

David H. Richter

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

we need to think more about what we read and write 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Representative or significant paragraph: Early in the Preface, Richter contends that the best way to teach our students to think well is "to be forthright about the irreconcilable differences within the profession over the interpretation and evaluation of texts and to highlight in our teaching precisely these differences" Studying the debates over the disciplinary object of literature and the multiple methods for its study helps students, in Gerald Graff's words, "learn to talk the otherwise mysterious intellectual discourse by which books and ideas are discussed in the academy and the world outside the academy. It helps students become active participants in a cultural conversation that has too often excluded them." If students do not find reason to examine the tacit assumption that they are now incontrovertibly citizens in a newly formed "state of theory" then they become all-too-willing captives of the ideology of that state.

(...)

What happens when creative writing students become teachers and still aren't aware of such debates?

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

Walter Benjamin

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Editorial Review:

Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general—in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

This essay, however, is only the beginning of a vast collection of writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate what was revolutionary about Benjamin’s explorations on media. Long before Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.

This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting. The volume contains some of Benjamin’s best-known work alongside fascinating, little-known essays—some appearing for the first time in English. In the context of his passionate engagement with questions of aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin’s media theory can be fully appreciated.

(20080704)

On Beauty and Being Just.

Elaine Scarry

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Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political interests. In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms.

Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a "surfeit of aliveness." In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.

Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.

The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics)

Lionel Trilling

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Editorial Review:

The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism.

Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.