Description
CAMBRIDGE Ideology and Inscription Cultural Studies after Benjamin De Man and Bakhtin 2014 Edition by Tom Cohen
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. Table of contents :- Introduction: Webwork, or 'That spot is bewitched'; Part I. Ciphers - Or Counter-Genealogies for a Critical 'Present': 1. Reflections on post 'post-mortem de Man'; 2. The ideology of dialogue: the de Man/Bakhtin connection; 3. Mnemotechnics: time of the seance, or the Mimetic blind of 'cultural studies'; Part II. Expropriating 'Cinema' - Or, Hitchcock's Mimetic War: 4. Beyond 'the Gaze': Hitchcock, Zizek, and the ideological sublime; 5. Sabotaging the ocularist state; Part III. Tourings - Or, the Monadic Switchboard: 6. Echotourism: Nietzschean Cyborgs, Anthropophagy, and the rhetoric of science in cultural studies; 7. Altered states: stoned in Marseilles, or the addiction to reference; 8. Contretemps: notes, on contemporary 'travel'.