Michael Sprinker - Böcker

This critical reinterpretation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past offers a fresh, socio-historical analysis of the novel. Departing from the more formalist and rhetorical trends in recent Proust criticism, Michael Sprinker draws upon historical scholarship to assess Proust's portrait of French society, and shows that the novel's account of the class structure and rivalries between the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie during the first half-century of the Third French Republic was both precise and critically engaged. He argues that in other areas, notably the nature of nationalist sentiment and gender ideology, Proust offers insight into phenomena studied only in fragmentary ways in previous historical writing on this crucial period. His study provides an original approach in its combination of history and literature, and is the most thorough work of Marxist criticism on Proust to date.

Louis Althusser remained until his death in 1990 the most controversial of the "master thinkers" who emerged from the turbulent Parisian intellectual scene of the 1960s. The publication of his bestselling posthumous "autobiography", L'avenir dure longtemps, has now refueled some of these controversies. Hugely influential, whether lauded or vilified, Althusser occupies a unique place in contemporary philosophy. What is certain is that Althusserian themes and motifs continue to constitute a vital region in materialist thought.The Althusserian Legacy is the first collective attempt to draw up a balance sheet, not on Althusser alone but on the questions that his work helped to bring to the forefront of Marxist theory. The volume brings together work in history, philosophy, economics, sociology, and literary criticism, all of it derived from or significantly inflected by Althusser. Taken together, the essays assess soberly, critically, but always generously, the full extent of his legacy.The volume contains a lengthy interview with Jacques Derrida, a long-time friend and colleague of Althusser at the École Normale in Paris, and concludes with obituaries by Derrida and Gregory Elliott. Perhaps only now, more than a decade after his active intellectual life has come to a close, is it possible to render sound, just judgments on the meaning and significance of this much-debated body of work. The Althusserian Legacy is a rich beginning to that important task.

This book sets out to clarify the nature of the aesthetic as a category within the theory of historical materialism. It opens with an analysis of Marx's brief discussion of Greek art in the Grundrisse, moves through a series of readings of specifically bourgeois texts, including those of Ruskin, G.M. Hopkins, Nietzsche and Henry James, and then to the terrain of Marxism in the concepts of history underwriting the work of Fredric Jameson and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sprinkler detours through the recent works of Perry Anderson to set the stage for a systematic consideration of the theoretical itinerary and continuing relevance of the contributions of Louis Althusser.Imaginary Relations is a cogently argued attempt to shift the terrain of Marxist theorizing about art from the domain of ideology considered as simply false consciousness to a concept of art which makes aesthetic texts sources of empirical data about the real, historical world.

This volume is the first book-length examination of Said's remarkable career, providing a critical survey of his writings and an interim assessment of his achievements in both the cultural and political spheres. This collection includes essays on the Arab-Islamic context of Said's work, his reception among Israeli and American Jews, the institutional contexts of his cultural criticism, and his interventions in Middle Eastern politics.

With the publication of Specters of Marx in 1993, Jacques Derrida redeemed a longstanding pledge to confront Marx's texts directly and in detail. His characteristically bravura presentation provided a provocative re-reading of the classics in the Western tradition and posed a series of challenges to Marxism.In a timely intervention in one of today's most vital theoretical debates, the contributors to Ghostly Demarcations respond to the distinctive program projected by Specters of Marx. The volume features sympathetic meditations on the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction by Fredric Jameson, Werner Hamacher, Antonio Negri, Warren Montag, and Rastko Möcnik, brief polemical reviews by Terry Eagleton and Pierre Macherey, and sustained political critiques by Tom Lewis and Aijaz Ahmad. The volume concludes with Derrida's reply to his critics in which he sharpens his views about the vexed relationship between Marxism and deconstruction.

Spanning time and space from late Victorian Britain and Ireland to postwar America and Latin America, Late Imperial Culture maps crucial regions in the terrain of imperial cultural practices including theater, film, photography, fiction, autobiography, and body art. The forms reviewed in this lively collection range from those which accept and reproduce empire's dominant self-images to scathing critiques of the oppressions that colonialism has visited upon its subjects and the price it continues to exact from them.A diverse range of theoretically sophisticated and historically informed contributors take as given two fundamental facts about the culture of imperialism: firstly, that it has a long and complex history which, in the present epoch, merits its being designated "late"; and, secondly, that its impact on the contemporary world is far from exhausted. Together they highlight the contradictions in the serried cultural practices of imperialism in its different historical periods.Contributors: Aijaz Ahmad, Steven Cagan, Román de la Campa, David Glover, May Joseph, Caren Kaplan, Rob Nixon, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and Marianna Torgovnick.