High Resolution: Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy

Sussman, Henry S.

ISBN 10: 0195055039 / ISBN 13: 9780195055030

Published by Oxford University Press, 1989

About this Item

Near fine book and jacket.

Seller Inventory # 106336

Bibliographic Details

• Title: High Resolution: Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication Date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195055039
• ISBN 13: 9780195055030
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Non-Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

At the heart of this important new book is the tension between literacy and the open acknowledgement of discrepancies within social and linguistic fields on the one hand, and what Sussman terms the resolving function, the utopian picture of harmony depicted by the state and large organizations, on the other. After discussing some examples of the resolving function--Barthes's notion of the myth, Kundera's fictional treatment of kitsch, and contemporary television--Sussman draws on a line of theoretical inquiry extending from Saussure to Derrida in order to put forth a differential model of literacy in which the skills necessary to participate productively in culture are more disjunctive than associative in nature. Awareness of the discrepancies set into play by language is necessary, he argues, for both the individual and the society to understand the complex and sometimes contradictory web of socioeconomic, political, and semiological relations in which they are involved. Combining literary theory with close textual readings of works by Hawthorne, Melville, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Italo Calvino, this book is the first to explore the socio-political correlatives to literary studies--the mass media's ambivalence toward the linguistic apprehensions and skills that make them possible.

From the Back Cover

'High Resolution' examines the predicament of literacy in mass culture from the perspective of contemporary critical theory. Sussman argues that there is tension between literacy and the open acknowledgment of discrepancies within social and linguistic fields on the one hand, and what he terms the resolving function, the utopian picture of harmony depicted by the state and large organizations, on the other.