Cultural Semantics
Keywords of Our Time
Published on 30. August 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-1-55849-116-8 (ISBN)
Description
A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter - and about why ideas matter. Borrowing from Flaubert's notion of a dictionary of ""received ideas"" and Raymond Williams's explorations of the ""keywords"" of the modern age, Jay investigates some of the central concepts by which we currently organize our thoughts and lives. His topics range from ""theory"" and ""experience"" to the meaning of ""multiculturalism"" and the dynamics of cultural ""subversion."" Among the thinkers he engages are Bataille and Foucault, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Walter Benjamin, Christa Wolf, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
By looking closely at what ""words do and perform,"" Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. By helping to distance us from much that we now take for granted, he makes it difficult for us to remain comfortably certain about what we think we know.
Elegantly written and richly insightful, this is a work of cultural criticism and intellectual analysis of the first order.
By looking closely at what ""words do and perform,"" Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. By helping to distance us from much that we now take for granted, he makes it difficult for us to remain comfortably certain about what we think we know.
Elegantly written and richly insightful, this is a work of cultural criticism and intellectual analysis of the first order.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Massachusetts
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 26 mm
Weight
426 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-55849-116-8 (9781558491168)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Martin Jay is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. His books include The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1950; Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas; and Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.