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Ideology and Inscription

'Cultural Studies' after Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin

Tom Cohen author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:1st Oct '98

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Ideology and Inscription cover

A critique of cultural studies that invokes Bakhtin, Benjamin, and de Man.

In Ideology and Inscription Tom Cohen questions the way history is currently invoked in cultural studies and argues for a new politics of memory.In 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 paralysing 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. The book challenges many of the prevailing methodologies and assumptions of the contemporary critical scene and, through analyses of such topics as the rhetoric of science, ecological criticism, and the films of Hitchcock, demonstrates the subtlety and critical power of a more genuinely 'materialist' approach to a wide range of cultural texts.

'This book presents the most comprehensive and brilliant study of critical theory in our day. Tom Cohen writes in 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

ISBN: 9780521599672

Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 15mm

Weight: 350g

270 pages