This new Encyclopedia of Postmodernism is structured with biographical entries on all the key contributors to the postmodernism debate, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieum, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas and Wittgenstein. Providing an all-encompassing and welcome addition to the field, the Encyclopedia contains entries on foundational concepts of postmodernism which have revolutionized thinking in every intellectual discipline. This new Encyclopedia is the first to provide comprehensive A-Z coverage of the key individuals and concepts of postmodernism. The 300+ entries include: * African (...) American studies * Roland Barthes * binary opposition * Buddhism * comparative literature * cyberculture * death of God * Gilles Deleuze * desire * digital culture * end of history * globalization * grand narrative * improvisation * jouissance * logocentrism * metalanguage * sadism * theatre arts * trope * visuality * Cornell West * and much more. Fully cross-referenced and indexed, with suggestionsfor further reading. (shrink)

Para/Inquiry represents the next generation of postmodern studies. Focusing on cultural studies religion, and literature, Victor E. Taylor provides us with a fresh look at the history and main themes of postmodernism, both in style and content. Central to the book is the status of the sacred in postmodern times. Taylor explores the sacred images in art, culture and literature. We see that the concept of the sacred is uniquely singular and resistant to an easy assimilation into artistic, cultural (...) or narrative forms. Anyone wishing to gain a new and exciting understanding of postmodernism, will read this book with great pleasure. (shrink)

_Para/Inquiry_ represents the next generation of postmodern studies. Focusing on cultural studies religion, and literature, Victor E. Taylor provides us with a fresh look at the history and main themes of postmodernism, both in style and content. Central to the book is the status of the sacred in postmodern times. Taylor explores the sacred images in art, culture and literature. We see that the concept of the sacred is uniquely singular and resistant to an easy assimilation into artistic, cultural (...) or narrative forms. Anyone wishing to gain a new and exciting understanding of postmodernism, will read this book with great pleasure. (shrink)

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the cultural representations of Jesus in the context of contemporary religious theory and continental philosophy. It looks at Jesus in view of an updated Derridean hauntology and spectrality, with an emphasis on the inherent plasticity of the Christian heritage. While the work engages with the recent Jesus-centered writings of Slavoj Žižek, François Laruelle, and Giorgio Agamben, it places a greater and much needed emphasis on the philosophical, theological, and cultural links between a plastic, (...) hauntological Christian heritage and Jesus's historically evolving plural subjectivity, with the latter explored in texts of popular culture. It is a multidisciplinary study of Jesus, as well as a dynamic Christian heritage that simultaneously constructs and deconstructs Jesus's philosophical, political, and cultural centrality. (shrink)

This three-volume set is a collection of key critical responses by leading scholars to the philosophical and theoretical writings of this late postmodern philosopher. Organized thematically, the collection includes commentaries on Lyotard's life and early philosophical writings, as well as on ethics, aesthetics, and politics. With a new introduction by the editor providing a comprehensive overview of Jean-François Lyotards life and works, this impressive collection provides students and scholars with a valuable resource for studying this important philosophical figure.

The ‘literary Jesus’ is a fluid figure, which means that he is a literary creation not solidified by tradition, orthodoxy, or dogma. Authors from D.H. Lawrence to José Saramago have reshaped, re-contoured, and transformed Jesus into an array of subject positions, with each literary articulation relating to mythology, philosophy, and politics. Teaching Jesus as a literary event allows students to take overly familiar religious discourses and traditional understandings of Jesus and rethink them in terms of other conceptual possibilities, possibilities that (...) open up conversations about the creative literary imagination. (shrink)

Postmodernism has emerged as a significant cultural, political and intellectual concept which has fundamentally altered our understanding of architecture, selfhood, knowledge formation, ethics, history, economics and politics. Until now, the primary and most historically significant accounts of postmodernism have remained uncollected. This set provides scholars with a much needed interdisciplinary and comprehensive collection of essays that map out the ways in which postmodernism is conceptualized and demonstrate how it has caused a wide range of traditions and disciplines to redefine their (...) objects of study and modes of inquiry. The volumes include: * foundational essays * critical texts * disciplinary texts covering the visual arts and architecture, the humanities and the social sciences. (shrink)

The dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the dismantling effects postmodern discourses have within the humanities. Postmodernism's anti-foundationalism, I argue, can only take shape around questions of ultimacy and sacrality in human existence. The dissertation explores the emergence, persistence and metamorphosis of the ultimate and the sacred in art history, modern literature, continental philosophy, and religion. Central figures studied in the work include Mircea Eliade, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Andre Malraux, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Part of Frost's continuing appeal to the "popular imagination" stems from his pronunciamentos on diverse topics: the metaphoric "pleasure of ulteriority," "the sound of sense," poems beginning in wisdom and ending in delight—"a momentary stay against confusion." These phrases along with favorite one-liners have made their way into our lexicon as memorable formulations both of Frost's ars poetica and of quotidian reality. Even schoolboys allegedly know the poet in these or similar terms. And why not? Yet the supposed "commonness" of (...) Frost is precisely what must be brought under radical scrutiny—including his formulaic statements of intent. Though these statements have been used effectively for critical purposes, the fact remains that they themselves are often problematic and tend toward the disconcertingly devious.1 That Frost's recourse to the rhetoric of irony and indirection is by no means confined to his poetry should not deter us from using his statements of intent to understand his poetry more fully. A cautionary "go slow," however, is in order. · 1. This is one reason I have difficulty accepting Elaine Barry's claims for Frost as a theorist. Having distinguished between Frost as "critical theorist" and as "practical critic," Barry concludes: "Robert Frost has left us a body of critical theory that is probably larger than that of any American poet. It has scope and depth, wit and subtlety—and a great sanity. In its significance, it bears favorable comparison with the formalized criticism of Eliot or Pound . . ." . Frost makes some most suggestive statements—often requiring de-metaphorization—about poetry, especially his own. But taken as a whole, those statements constitute, at best, only an approximation of "theory." That this is not merely semantic haggling over the definition of theory should be evident from Barry's favorable comparison of Frost to Pound and especially Eliot. Victor E. Vogt has recently completed a study on love, death, and the quotidian in modern American drama and is currently working on the moral and sociological aspects of dramatism. (shrink)

Long since, people tried to solve the mystery of the way that led to the appearance and propagation of living entities. However, no harmonious understanding of this mystery existed, because neither the scientifically grounded source minerals nor the ambient conditions were proposed and because it was groundlessly taken that the process of living matter origination is endothermal. The Life Origination Hydrate Theory (LOH-Theory) first suggests the chemical way capable of leading from the specified abundant natural minerals to origination of multitudes (...) of multitudes of simplest living entities and gives an original explanation for the phenomena of chirality and racemization delay. The LOH-Theory covers the period up to origination of the genetic code. The LOH-Theory is grounded on the following three discoveries based on the available information and on the results of our experimental works performed using original instrumentation and computer simulations. (1) There is the only one triad of natural minerals applicable for exothermal thermodynamically possible chemical syntheses of simplest living-matter components. (2) N-base, ribose, and phosphdiester radicals and nucleic acids as whole are size-compatible with structural gas-hydrate cavities. (3) The gas-hydrate structure arises around amido-groups in cooled undisturbed systems consisting of water and highly-concentrated functional polymers with amido-groups.The natural conditions and historic periods favorable for simplest living matter origination are revealed. The LOH-Theory is supported by results of observations, biophysical and biochemical experiments, and wide application of original three-dimensional and two-dimensional computer simulations of biochemical structures within gas-hydrate matrix. The instrumentation and procedures for experimental verification of the LOH-Theory are suggested. If future experiments are successful, they, possibly, could be the first step on the way to industrial synthesis of food from minerals, i.e., to execution of the work that is performed by plants. (shrink)