Theories of Contemporary Culture – serie

"This wonderful book does nothing less than to create the next stage of feminist thought." —Catharine R. Stimpson"De Lauretis provides a way of thinking about feminism that accepts rather than tries to resolve differences, that refuses fixed definitional categories and insists instead on the contradictory and changing meaning of gendered identities." —The Women's Review of Books"This is not a new collection but it is still one of the best." —Exceptional Human ExperienceThe essays in this collection represent very recent developments in feminist research and writing in the areas of history, scientific discourse, literary criticism, and cultural theory.The contributors are: Teresa de Lauretis, Linda Gordon, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Ruth Bleier, Evelyn Fox Keller, Jessica Benjamin, Nancy K. Miller, Tania Modleski, Sondra O'Neale, Sheila Radford-Hill, Cherrie Moraga, Biddy Martin, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Mary Russo.

"This is an important book for all students of literature and history." —American Studies International" . . . thoughtful and provocative. . . . the essays . . . grant complexity and contradiction to mass culture, while interrogating its objects from positions that—explicitly or implicitly—derive from the left and from feminism." —The IndependentThese innovative and politically engaged essays reflect the paradox inherent in taking a critical approach to mass culture.The contributors, in many cases pioneers in their particular area of inquiry, include: Tania Modleski, Raymond Williams (interviewed here by Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow), Bernard Gendron, Rick Altman, Margaret Morse, Patricia Mellencamp, Judith Williamson, Jean Franco, Kaja Silverman, Dana Polan, and Andreas Huyssen.

"This intellectually sexy collection features some of the best and brightest academic media analysts from Britain and the United States." —Voice Literary Supplement"The essays in this volume rigorously engage the challenges of postmodern cultural criticism and theory, the central contemporary debate in the humanities." —Communication Abstracts"Mellencamp has produced a challenging and an invigorating text. . . . It should provide much inspiration." —Journal of Communication"This is a particularly good collection of thirteen papers with, overall, much more theoretically interesting yet less obscure and more pleasure-giving content than the norm. Give it priority." —Media Information AustraliaThese essays, on the cutting edge of theoretical debate in the humanities, rigorously engage the challenges of postmodern cultural critique and theory. They range widely from detailed historical research to broad questions of theory and method.Contributors are Patricia Mellencamp, Meaghan Morris, John Caughie, Charlotte Brunsdon, Lynn Spigel, William Boddy, Eileen R. Meehan, Andrew Ross, Lynne Joyrich, Jane Gaines, Margaret Morse, Mary Ann Doane, and Stephen Heath.

Cultural displacement—physical dislocation from one's native culture or the colonizing imposition of a foreign culture—is one of the most formative experiences of our century. These essays examine the impact of this experience on contemporary notions of cultural identity from the perspectives of anthropology, history, philosophy, literature, and psychology.

In Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation, authors argue that teaching is a performance that incorporates the personal in acts of "im-personation." After David Crane's prefatory "postscript," George Otte recommends that students pretend, writing from various perspectives; Indira Karamcheti suggests putting on race as one can put on gender roles. Cheryl Johnson gets personal by playing the "trickster," and Chris Amirault explores the relationship between the teacher and "the good student." While Karamcheti, Gallop, and Lynne Joyrich use theatrical vehicles to structure their essays, Joseph Litvak, Arthur W. Frank, and Naomi Scheman incorporate performance as examples. Madeleine R. Grumet theorizes pedagogy, while Roger I. Simon suggests that pedagogical roles can be taken on and off at will; Gregory Jay discusses the ethical side of impersonation; and Susan Miller denounces "the personal" as a sham.

"The book not only confirms the high ethical stakes in informed contemporary reading; it offers a rare readerly pleasure in . . . exploring the wider cultural significance of gender and the body and their narrative representation." —Henry Sussman, SUNY-BuffaloGabriele Schwab revitalizes debates about literature's cultural function by exploring literary experience as an encounter with otherness. Drawing on literary theory, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, Schwab contends that literature facilitates contact with cultures that may seem foreign to us. At the same time, literature can render the familiar strange, and foreground what a culture tends to repress. At its best, literature challenges the very boundaries of the culture from which it emerges.Schwab's readings of writers such as Hawthorne, Faulkner, Joyce, Lewis Carroll, Djuna Barnes, Marguerite Duras, and John Cage demonstrate the centrality of aesthetics and the literary to studies of otherness and cultural contact.

"Methodologically situated in the contentious spaces between critical theory and cultural studies, and always attending to the implications of ethnicity, this book constitutes a unique intervention in contemporary cultural politics." —Social SemioticsAt a time when cultural identity has become intrinsic to the way we read our many "others," Rey Chow argues that what demands to be examined critically is no longer identity politics per se but the idealism—especially in the sense of idealizing otherness—that lies at the heart of identity politics. She discusses multiple cultural forms—fiction, film, popular music, poetry, and essays—and a range of cultural topics—pedagogy, multiculturalism, fascism, sexuality, miscegenation, fantasy, nostalgia, and postcoloniality.

What good is history to cultural studies? Meaghan Morris looks at struggles over "history" in social settings created by capitalism: in tourist landscapes and in television time. The materials of her analysis are motels, shopping malls, beaches, and local politics. She focuses on history and cultural heritage as issues of controversy for white working-class and poor suburban communities, as well as for urban cultural elites.

Figuring Age engages the virtually invisible subject of older women in western culture. Like other markers of social difference, age is given meaning by a culture. Yet unlike gender and race, the subjects of age and aging have received little sustained attention. Central to Figuring Age is the crucial question of how women are aged by culture. How are older women represented in a visual culture that is dominated by images of youth in television, film, and life performance? How do psychoanalysis, rejuvenation therapy and hormone replacement therapy, the fashion system, cosmetic surgery, and midlife bodybuilding shape our views of aging as well as of the older body itself? What is the "timing" of aging? To what extent is aging a culturally-induced trauma?

Biotechnology and CultureBodies, Anxieties, EthicsEdited by Paul BrodwinUntangles the broad cultural effects of biotechnologies "A timely and perceptive look from many acute angles, at some of the most anxiety producing issues of the day." —Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley"This impressive collection offers a number of rich examples of why the development of anthropological studies of science, technology, and their disruptive social effects is a leading edge of critical enquiry." —Arthur Kleinman, Harvard UniversityAs birth, illness, and death increasingly come under technological control, struggles arise over who should control the body and define its limits and capacities. Biotechnologies turn the traditional "facts of life" into matters of expert judgment and partisan debate. They blur the boundary separating people from machines, male from female, and nature from culture. In these diverse ways, they destroy the "gold standard" of the body, formerly taken for granted. Biotechnologies become a convenient, tangible focus for political contests over the nuclear family, legal and professional authority, and relations between the sexes. Medical interventions also transform intimate personal experience: giving birth, building new families, and surviving serious illness now immerse us in a web of machines, expert authority, and electronic images. We use and imagine the body in radically different ways, and from these emerge new collective discourses of morality and personal identity.Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics brings together historians, anthropologists, cultural critics, and feminists to examine the broad cultural effects of technologies such as surrogacy, tissue-culture research, and medical imaging. The moral anxieties raised by biotechnologies and their circulation across class and national boundaries provide other interdisciplinary themes for discourse in these essays. The authors favor complex social dramas of the refusal, celebration, or ambivalent acceptance of new medical procedures. Eschewing polemics or pure theory, contributors show how biotechnology collides with everyday life and reshapes the political and personal meanings of the body.Contributors include Paul Brodwin, Lisa Cartwright, Thomas Csordas, Gillian Goslinga-Roy, Deborah Grayson, Donald Joralemon, Hannah Landecker, Thomas Laqueur, Robert Nelson, Susan Squier, Janelle Taylor, and Alice Wexler.Paul Brodwin, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Adjunct Professor of Bioethics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, is the author of Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power and a coeditor of Pain as Human Experience: Anthropological Perspectives.Theories of Contemporary Culture—Kathleen Woodward, general editor

Representing Animals explores the complex and often surprising connections between our imagining of animals and our cultural environment. The contributors—historians, literary critics, anthropologists, artists, art historians, and scholars of cultural studies—examine the ways we talk, write, photograph, imagine, and otherwise represent animals. The book includes topics such as pet cloning, fox hunting, animatronic characters, and how we displace our fear of aging onto our dogs. Representing Animals demonstrates the deep connections between the way we think about animals and the way we have thought about ourselves and our cultures in different times and places. Its publication marks a formative moment in the emerging field of animal studies.Contributors: Steve Baker, Marcus Bullock, Jane Desmond, Erica Fudge, Andrew Isenberg, Kathleen Kete, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Teresa Mangum, Garry Marvin, Susan McHugh, and Nigel Rothfels.