Empire Burlesque

The Fate of Critical Culture in Global America

Daniel T O'Hara author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:9th Apr '03

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

Empire Burlesque cover

Discusses the effects of globalization on the field of literary studies and the formation of a critical identity in America.

Traces the emergence of the contemporary global context within which American critical identity is formed. This title argues that globalization has had a markedly negative impact on American cultural criticism, circumscribing both its material and imaginative potential, reducing much of it to absurdity.Empire Burlesque traces the emergence of the contemporary global context within which American critical identity is formed. Daniel T. O’Hara argues that globalization has had a markedly negative impact on American cultural criticism, circumscribing both its material and imaginative potential, reducing much of it to absurdity. By highlighting the spectacle of its own self-parody, O’Hara aims to shock U.S. cultural criticism back into a sense of ethical responsibility.

Empire Burlesque presents several interrelated analyses through readings of a range of writers and cultural figures including Henry James, Freud, Said, De Man, Derrida, and Cordwainer Smith (an academic, spy, and classic 1950s and 1960s science fiction writer). It describes the debilitating effects of globalization on the university in general and the field of literary studies in particular, it critiques literary studies’ embrace of globalization theory in the name of a blind and vacant modernization, and it meditates on the ways critical reading and writing can facilitate an imaginative alternative to institutionalized practices of modernization. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, it diagnoses contemporary American Studies as typically driven by the mindless abjection and transference of professional identities.

A provocative commentary on contemporary cultural criticism, Empire Burlesque will inform debates on the American university across the humanities, particularly among those in literary criticism, cultural studies, and American studies.

“In the spirit of Yeats, his tutelary figure, Daniel T. O'Hara gauges the state of America's imperial anarchy and puts forth an imaginative response, compounded from Foucault, Lacan, and Henry James. This is a defense of literature like no other.”—Jonathan Arac, Columbia University
Empire Burlesque provides a unique perspective on how much the globalism that, properly, should be ‘post-American' is actually another (re)production of America. It is impressive work.”—Patrick O'Donnell, author of Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative

ISBN: 9780822330325

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 862g

392 pages