Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Author's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Facing Language: Wordsworth's First Poetic Spirits (“Blest Babe,” “Drowned Man,” “Blind Beggar”)
- 2 Aesthetic Ideology and Material Inscription: On Hegel's Aesthetics and Keats's Urn
- 3 Spectre Shapes: “The Body of Descartes?”
- 4 Reading for Example: A Metaphor in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy
- 5 Towards a Fabulous Reading: Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense”
- 6 Reading Over Endless Histories: Henry James's “The Altar of the Dead”
- 7 Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de Man's Historical Materialism)
- 8 The Future Past of Literary Theory
- Appendix: Interview: “Deconstruction at Yale”
- Index
Series Editor's Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Author's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Facing Language: Wordsworth's First Poetic Spirits (“Blest Babe,” “Drowned Man,” “Blind Beggar”)
- 2 Aesthetic Ideology and Material Inscription: On Hegel's Aesthetics and Keats's Urn
- 3 Spectre Shapes: “The Body of Descartes?”
- 4 Reading for Example: A Metaphor in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy
- 5 Towards a Fabulous Reading: Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense”
- 6 Reading Over Endless Histories: Henry James's “The Altar of the Dead”
- 7 Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de Man's Historical Materialism)
- 8 The Future Past of Literary Theory
- Appendix: Interview: “Deconstruction at Yale”
- Index
Summary
Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends and after-life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been established and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves so-called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures of auto-critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a more-than-critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which thinks thought's own limits?
‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the transformative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a ‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisions such thinking. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-is-necessary of Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Material InscriptionsRhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory, pp. vi - viiPublisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013