Anthem symplokē Studies in Theory

A reconfiguration of modern American history, showing how multiple movements at different times challenged a singularly defined modern America, and a re-representation of the modern American novel, accenting the different critical literary voices to effect a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm.

Exploring viral imagery of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Presidents Trump and Biden, Black Lives Matter, as well as the rise of a “black aesthetic” in white artworlds, this book shows that iconopolitics—especially constellations of visual images—has become pervasive within contemporary life. It questions the implications for critical thought and political action.

In describing their personal encounters with works that have stayed with them, scholars and artists here address the aesthetic, philosophical, and historical reasons that inform what T. Eliot has called great art’s “experience both of a moment and of a lifetime.”

The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies is concerned with the ways in which literary and cultural criticism are and have been situated in relation to a variety of ideological and institutional structures, including those of world literature, American studies, spatial literary studies, cultural critique, globalization and postmodernity.

A wide-ranging collection of essays that makes the case for the humanities as central to our self-understanding, for theory as the latest incarnation of a perennial concern with the relation between words and things, and for the ancient as constitutive of the modern.

This book is about Raymond Federman and his incredible textual obsession with Samuel Beckett. Federman was a scholar of Beckett, postmodern theorist, a self-translator and avant-garde novelist. 

A reading of Theory that in tracing when and where Theory arises in the event of reading, proposes how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today.

Largely erased from disciplinary memory, Paul de Man’s replacement of canon with literariness as the object of literary studies preserved a discourse of devotion and disqualification homologous with Reaganism. This negative moralism shelters professional privilege and competition from scrutiny, supported by misrecognitions like hermeneutic suspicion, materiality, and identity politics.

Elegy for Literature is an overview of the current crisis within the academic study of literature. It suggests a way forward for rethinking the work that literary studies can do – less as a set of literary objects, and more as a way of life.

This Is Not the End of Theory is a warning to all who value critical theory, humanities, and pedagogy to be wary of new directions in antitheory regardless of their source—and to do everything they can to avoid them taking root.

A group of homogeneous interviews with contemporary literary and cultural theorists All the interviews are completed. The same ten questions were addressed to all the interviewees. The result is a homogeneous volume unlike most other interview projects. 

This book makes an argument critical to literary theory and sexuality in 2025.  It argues that Colette’s fiction portrays a woman struggling to live in the throes of the incest taboo, understood in its psychological implications for power relations both private and public, then and now.