Cultural History After Foucault Book

Michel Foucault was both a historian and a maker of culture. Despite his early death, he left an imposing and dazzling oeuvre that has furnished several disciplinary fields, sociology and criminology among them, with a new conceptual vocabulary and an agenda of new research to be conducted. Subsequently he has been severely scrutinized by scholars of the disciplines in and around which he worked, yet the real significance of his personality and work lie beyond disciplinary boundaries and even beyond the issue whether in specific instances he was right or wrong. Like Nietzsche, his adopted predecessor, he will probably be remembered most vividly as a great gadfly who questioned central assumptions in Western culture. His achievements may be problematic and destined to remain controversial, yet his ideas have changed the ways scholars of cultural history and interpretive social scientists approach such issues as discourse theory, theory of knowledge, Eros, technologies of the Self and the Other, punishment and prisons, and asylums and madness. Dr. Neubauer has here assembled a collection of papers by historians, literary scholars, and philosophers, grouped not by discipline but under general, trans disciplinary rubrics. Contributors address the whole range of Foucault's oeuvre, to explain its implications, to criticize its limitations and weaknesses, and above all to exploit the rich suggestiveness of its agenda. All of the major controversial aspects of Foucauldian cultural history are broached in these papers: among them the position of the subject, the fusion of power and knowledge, sexuality, and historical structures and changes. Illustrations and case studies are drawn from antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic. The breadth of the undertaking makes this collection suitable for seminars and graduate courses in various departments. CONTENTS Introduction. Part I. Modes of the Subject in Cultural History. 1. No Sex Please, We're American: Erotophobia, Liberation, and Cultural History, George Rousseau. 2. Foucault's Technologies of the Self and the Cultural History, fan Goldstein. 3. Foucault's Rhetorical Consciousness and The Possibilities of Acting upon a Regime of Truth, Frans-Willem Korsten . 4. Power and Political Spirituality: Michel Foucault on the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Michiel Leezenberg . Part ll. Modes of Doing Cultural History. 5. Foucault Reformed by Certeau: Historical Strategies of Discipline and Everyday Tactics of Appropriation, Willem Frijhoff . 6. Answering Foucault: Notes on Modes of Order in the Cultural World and the Making of History, Mario f. Valdes. 7. Foucault's Shells. Freud's Symptoms: Towards a Psycho- analytic Conception of Cultural History, Sarah Roff. 8. Reading! Writing/Killing: Foucault, Cultural History and the French Revolution, William Scott. Part m. Modes of Conceptualizing Cultural History . 9. The Process of Intellectual Change: A Post-Foucauldian Hypothesis, Ian Maclean. 10. Periodization as a Technique of Cultural Identification, Vladimir Biti . 11. The Suppression of the Negative Moment in Foucault's History of Sexuality, Paul Allen Miller. 12. Foucault in Gay America: Sexuality at Plymouth Plantation, David Van Leer. 13. Philosophy in the Filigree of Power: The Limits of an Immanent Critique, Saul Tobias. Bibliography The essays in this volume have been reprinted from Arcadia: Zeitschrlft filr Allgemeine und Ve18leichende Literaturwissenschaft, @1998, Walter de Gruyter.Read More