Research Catalog

Title

What's wrong with postmodernism : critical theory and the ends of philosophy / Christopher Norris.

Author

Norris, Christopher, 1947-

Publication

New York ; London : Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

viii, 287 pages; 24 cm

Summary

What's Wrong with Postmodernism collects seven of Christopher Norris's reviews of recent work in literary theory. Throughout, Norris appears to assume that his readers possess substantial background knowledge in politics and philosophy as well as literary theory. He clearly deserves his reputation as the most philosophically astute of British literary theorists and, considering the abstruseness of the topics under consideration, he also manages to be surprisingly clear. Two purposes permeate the collection. The first is to criticize postmodernism, described as "the upshot of a generalized incredulity with regard to all theories, truth-claims, or 'scientific' notions of system and method." Through discussion of Jean Baudrillard's Selected Writings and Stanley Fish's Doing What Comes Naturally, Norris argues that in addition to its obvious intellectual flaws, postmodernism leads in the political sphere to malaise, cynicism, and apathy. The appeal of postmodernism, he suggests, is due to the failure of literary theories based on Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralism; fortunately, because there are approaches to the philosophy of language other than Saussure's, the postmodernist turn is not irresistible. -- Description from http://bookstore.autonomedia.org (April 16, 2012).

Subject

• Postmodernism
• Literature > Philosophy
• Methodology
• Methods
• methodology
• literary theory
• Postmodernisme
• Kritiek (filosofie)
• Literatuur
• Cultuurfilosofie

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographies and index.

Contents

Introduction: Criticism, history and the politics of theory ---- I. Deconstruction, postmodernism and philosophy: Habermas on Derrida --- II. Right you are (if you think so): Stanley Fish and the rhetoric of assent --- III. Limited think: how not to read Derrida --- VI. Lost in the funhouse: Baudrillard and the politics of postmodernism --- V. Derrida and Kant --- VI. Music, language and the sublime --- VII. Sittling accounts: Heidegger, de Man and the ends of philosophy.

ISBN

• 0745007147
• 0745009743
• 9780745009742
• 9780745007144

LCCN

91217208

OCLC

• ocm24906611
• 24906611
• SCSB-1898765

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library