Research Catalog
What's wrong with postmodernism : critical theory and the ends of philosophy
- 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.
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Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
---|---|---|---|---|
Book/Text | Use in library | B831.2 .N67 1990b | 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
- 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