The Future of Theory (Wiley-Blackwell Manifestos) - Softcover

Rabaté, Jean-Michel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0631230130 ISBN 13: 9780631230137

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002

Synopsis

In this controversial manifesto, Jean-Michel Rabaté addresses current anxieties about the future of literary and cultural theory and proposes that it still has a crucial role to play.

About this title

About the Author

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published books on Beckett, Bernhard, Pound, Joyce, Lacan, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. His recent books include The Ghosts of Modernity (1996), Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (2001), and Jacques Lacan and Literature (2001). He has also edited several collections of essays, including Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (1997), Jacques Lacan in America (2000), and The Cambridge Companion to Jacques Lacan (2002).

From the Back Cover

Is Theory dead? Is it, as skeptics suggest, too distant from anything “real” to be useful, too sweeping in its referral of all texts to grand theses? Or is it a mask for fashion and self-promotion in academia? In this controversial manifesto, Jean-Michel Rabaté addresses current anxieties about Theory and claims that it still has a crucial role to play.

Acknowledging that he cannot speak about the future of Theory without taking stock of its past, Rabaté starts by sketching its genealogy, particularly its relation to Surrealism, philosophy, and the hard sciences. Against this background, he proposes that Theory, like hysteria, consistently points out the inadequacies of official, serious and “masterful” knowledge. Its role, he suggests, is to ask difficult, foundational questions, which entail revisionary readings of culture and its texts.

In this way, Rabaté claims, whether the theory of the moment is structuralism or globalization, Theory in its broader sense will always return, providing us with provocative and stimulating insights into what we do and how we read.

Acknowledging that he cannot speak about the future of Theory without taking stock of its past, Rabaté starts by sketching its genealogy, particularly its relation to Surrealism, philosophy, and the hard sciences. Against this background, he proposes that Theory, like hysteria, consistently points out the inadequacies of official, serious and “masterful” knowledge. Its role, he suggests, is to ask difficult, foundational questions, which entail revisionary readings of culture and its texts.

In this way, Rabaté claims, whether the theory of the moment is structuralism or globalization, Theory in its broader sense will always return, providing us with provocative and stimulating insights into what we do and how we read.

Reviews

Does theory as a human activity organize consciousness, eviscerate ingenuity, supplant hysteria, or simply limn the borders of knowledge? Drawing on the works of ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophers, psychiatry's founders, and experimental literary luminaries, Rabat takes the reader through arguments for and against each of these stances. The differences between theorizing about theory and realizing theory's powers are carefully and accessibly constructed through discussions of 20th-century Western intellectual activity and publishing. Theory, Rabate decides, must be necessarily posited in the future, a future built of texts and dialogs and, since James Joyce, dialogs within texts. Moving nimbly from Thales to Heidegger, from Charcot and Freud to Barthes and Sartre, to Paglia and Derrida, Rabate realizes the very arguments he makes, forcing the reader to look ahead rather than position his or her awareness from behind or even within theory. As with other books in this publisher's series, the intent is to engage the general educated public in a discussion of meaningful concepts, and Rabate succeeds excellently. For all public and academic collections. Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0631230130
• ISBN 13: 9780631230137
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176