Description
Book SynopsisAnatomizes what's fundamentally at stake when we think of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and when we substitute the question of who people are for the question of what they believe.
Trade Review"Michaels's absorbing new book swims against the critical stream with a brilliance and originality unmatched this side of Slavoj Zizek."--Henry Staten, Modernism/modernity "[This] book is not scholarship, criticism, or theory. It is a brazen call for the return to ideology."--Lindsay Waters, Chronicle of Higher Education "[W]hat makes this book compelling ... is his central thesis: that the apparent diversity of the marketplace of ideas, as in the marketplace of commodities, conceals fundamental uniformity (so many choices in the cereal aisle, so few in the voting booth)."--Robin J. Sowards, The Minnesota Review
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: The Blank Page 1 One: Posthistoricism 19 The End of History 19 Political Science Fictions 26 Partez au vert/Go on the green 41 The Shape of the Signifier 51 The End of Theory 66 Two: Prehistoricism 82 rocks 82 and stones 105 and trees 118 Three: Historicism 129 Remembering 129 Reliving 140 Dismembering 149 Forgetting 158 Coda: Empires of the Senseless 169 Notes 183 Index 213
