Category Archives: 6820
Jameson’s Cultural Logic
The collapse of base into superstructure that Jameson posits in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism seems to have broad and unsettling implications for the Marxist model itself. After all, if political-economy has aligned itself completely with cultural … Continue reading
On Aesthetic Theory
Aesthetic theories seem to fail insofar as they forgo their obligation to accept themselves as subjective. Kant seems least to attempt to disguise this fact. Judgment as a word retains its true subjective uncertainty. As used in court (and at … Continue reading
Teaching Benjamin
“The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (reprinted in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition) represents my first exposure to the work of Walter Benjamin. Since I first read it over the summer, … Continue reading
Lacanian Mathematics
Lacan asserts that language is a formulation only of “the correlations between signifier and signifier” with no recourse to any referent, either in the real world or at the core of our self, both of which are cut off from … Continue reading
Freud, Bakhin, and the Human Dream
The following represents a one-page tutorial I prepared for the graduate-level section of my Contemporary Literary Theory Course. I have reproduced it here as means of keeping the blog in continued conversation with itself. The issues addressed represent continuations of … Continue reading
>A Quick Look at (McKeon’s) Structuralism
>Walter Benjamin (in “The Storyteller”) laments the loss of reminiscence represented by Modernity. He relates this form of memory to the storyteller, who has his roots in oral tradition. These days, he argues, we are attracted by the verifiability of … Continue reading
>Nietzsche’s Not-logic
>How much of life is a battle between logic and not-logic. Whatever is the opposite of logic is what Nietzsche hopes to represent in the Dionysiac: logic’s dialectical antithesis. It is the same not-logic that dominates Freud’s conception of our … Continue reading
>Oscar Wilde and "The Critic as Artist"
>Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist (Excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition) represents an interesting synthesis of many of the ideas I have heretofore been exploring. In a strict sense, he seems to be interested … Continue reading
