Ideology and Inscription
Tom Cohen questions the way history, ideology and politics are invoked in contemporary cultural studies. Enlisting the work of three seminal figures in literary theory--Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and M. Bakhtin--Cohen argues for a new politics of memory that moves beyond what he sees as our current paralyzing preoccupation with the present, and also for a new approach to the reading and analysis of cultural texts that breaks with the mimetic premises of traditional criticism.
- Links three seminal figures in theory, Bakhtin, Benjamin, and de Man
- Addresses the future of cultural studies
- Author is well-known figure on US theory circuit with glowing endorsements from major critics on back cover
Reviews & endorsements
"This book presents the most comprehensive and brilliant study of critical theory in our day. Tom Cohen writes in a lucid, unrelenting prose of the repressed traumas that pervade most forms of contemporary thought." Avital Ronell
"Cohen's brilliant study is a landmark book that presents in bold delineation the future directions of humanistic studies." J. Hillis Miller
Product details
October 1998Paperback
9780521599672
270 pages
216 × 140 × 15 mm
0.35kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Webwork, or 'That spot is bewitched'
- Part I. Ciphers - Or Counter-Genealogies for a Critical 'Present':
- 1. Reflections on post 'post-mortem de Man'
- 2. The ideology of dialogue: the de Man/Bakhtin connection
- 3. Mnemotechnics: time of the seance, or the Mimetic blind of 'cultural studies'
- Part II. Expropriating 'Cinema' - Or, Hitchcock's Mimetic War:
- 4. Beyond 'the Gaze': Hitchcock, Zizek, and the ideological sublime
- 5. Sabotaging the ocularist state
- Part III. Tourings - Or, the Monadic Switchboard:
- 6. Echotourism: Nietzschean Cyborgs, Anthropophagy, and the rhetoric of science in cultural studies
- 7. Altered states: stoned in Marseilles, or the addiction to reference
- 8. Contretemps: notes, on contemporary 'travel'.