TY - BOOK AU - Ebert,Teresa L. TI - The task of cultural critique /Teresa L. Ebert SN - 9780252091063 AV - HM623 .T375 2009 PY - 2009/// CY - Urbana PB - University of Illinois Press KW - Culture KW - Study and teaching KW - History KW - Criticism KW - Electronic Books N1 - 2; Anatomy of contemporary cultural critique. The spectral concrete ; The abstract of transformative critique ; Desiring surfaces --; The work of critique. Affective pedagogy and feminist critique ; Chick lit: "not your mother's romance novels" ; Red love ; Globalization, the "multitude," and cynical critique; 2; b N2 - Annotation;
"A stimulating, path-breaking text that stands out as both an anti-text in the arena of cultural studies and as a classic Marxist analysis of the field of cultural critique."
--Peter McLaren, author ofChe Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution
"This powerful book confirms that Teresa L. Ebert is one of the most significant Marxist theorists currently writing about the humanities."
--Barbara Foley, author ofSpectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro
In this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes,The Task of Cultural Critiquemaps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness.
Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridan dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflitive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukcs, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.