The Point of Theory

Practices of Cultural Analysis

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Critical Theory/Marxism Cultural Studies

Edited by Mieke Bal and Inge Boer

Continuum Publishing

Due/Published August 2002, 326 pages, paper

ISBN 0826414230

What is the point of bringing the reflexive discourse called 'theory' to bear on such diverse subjects as the Statue of Liberty, the decorations in Freud's study, a fifteenth-century triptych and contemporary science, on Kant and postmodern literature, Indian traditions and the voice of a soprano? In this volume, twenty-two major cultural theorists seek to make the workings of culture understandable.

Contributors: Parveen Adams, Frank Ankersmit, Ernst can Alphen, Mieke Bal, Stephen Bann, Jane Beckett, Inge Boer, Elisabeth Bronfen, Norman Bryson, Deborah Cherry, Jonathan Culler, Joke Dame, George Dimock, Marianne Hirsch, Michael Ann Holly, Evelyn Fox Keller, Janneke Lam, Brian McHale, Keith Moxey, Griselda Pollock, Siep Stuurman, Peter van der Veer

Contents

1. Introduction: what's the point?
2. Liberty, maternity, commodification
3. Scared to death
4. Clues to events
5. Whatever happened to descriptive poetics?
6. Art in context
7. Death: the navel of the image
8. The case of the missing women
9. Masking the subject: practicing theory
10. In the long run we shall all be dead
11. Critical theory and the cultural life of historical images
12. Generating the Renaissance, or the individualization of culture
13. Kantian narrativism and beyond
14. Learning to read: a commentary on a work by Janneke Lam
15. The performativity of histories
16. This is not the orient: theory and postcolonial practice
17. Witnessing an annunciation
18. The three (dis)graces
19. The pictures over freud's couch
20. Sati and sanskrit: the move from orientalism to hinduism
21. The female voice as a fetish: occurrences in the practice of psychoanalysis and music
22. Situating the organism between telegraphs and computers
Translation of the words in Janneke Lam's work Learning to read
Note on contributors
List of illustrations
Bibliography
Index of terms
Index of names