Georg Lukács

Georg (György) Lukács (b. 13 April 1885–d. 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian philosopher and literary theorist of Jewish origin. His work substantially determined the 20th-century theoretical current of Western Marxism. Lukács had a long and often turbulent life due to his constant (not necessarily successful) efforts to unify theory and political practice. Consequently, his intellectual trajectory is marked by important theoretical shifts—a fact that makes it impossible to refer to central themes of his work without simultaneously distinguishing its main periods. There is, of course, a central idea, which permeates his investigations throughout his work. It is the critical analysis of the domination of subjectivism in modern society and culture that causes men’s alienation from their historical reality. One can distinguish three main periods in which Lukács was occupied by this question in different ways and on different levels: Lukács’s early work divided into his early pre-Marxist period, ranging from his young age to his turn to Marxism at the end of 1918, and his early revolutionary Marxist work of the 1920s (the most representative and influential of it being the collection History and Class Consciousness (1923)); his middle Marxist period, from his emigration to Moscow in 1930 to his return to Hungary in 1945; and his later Marxist period (among others, his mature works on aesthetics and social ontology). Lukács’s early (pre-Marxist and Marxist) work substantially influenced intellectuals of the wider tradition of critical theory, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lucien Goldman, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal Jürgen Habermas, Michael Löwy, Andrew Feenberg, Cornelius Castoriadis, and others. His middle and later work had an important impact on his disciples, the members of the Budapest school (Ágnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus, Mihály Vajda). After a period of vivid interest in Lukács in the 1960s and 1970s, a more subterranean process of reception of his work followed. Since 2010 a significant revitalization of the international interest in his work has been observed. At the same time, his works on realist literature are often considered as part of the canon of literary studies. Bibliography of and on Lukács is vast; therefore, its presentation has to be selective. This bibliography emphasizes the general overviews and collective volumes that offer multifaceted analyses of his work. As for the original works and the relevant special secondary literature we prioritize writings published in English.

Crip Theory

Crip theory began to flourish in the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory in the early decades of the 21st century. These fields attend to the complex workings of power and normalization in contemporary cultures, particularly to how institutions of modernity have materialized and sedimented a distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” and to how subjects deemed “abnormal” have contested such ideas. Disability studies pluralizes models for thinking about disability: if a culture of normalization reduces disability to lack or loss and positions disability as always in need of cure, disability studies challenges the singularity of this medical model. Disability studies scholars examine how able-bodied ideologies emerge in and through representation, and how such representations result in a culture of ableism that invalidates disabled experiences. Crip theory, in turn, emerged as a particular mode of doing disability studies, deeply in conversation with queer theory. The pride and defiance of queer culture, with its active reclamation or reinvention of language meant to wound, are matched by the pride and defiance of crip culture. Crip theory, however, is generatively paradoxical, working with and against identity and identification simultaneously. Crip theory affirms lived, embodied experiences of disability and the knowledges (or cripistemologies) that emerge from such experiences; at the same time, it is critical of the ways in which certain identities materialize and become representative to the exclusion of others that may not fit neatly within dominant vocabularies of disability. Many works in crip theory focus on the supposed margins of disability identification as well as on the intersections where gender, race, sexuality, and disability come together. Crip theory, additionally, offers an analytic that can be used for thinking about contexts or historical periods that do not seem on the surface to be about disability at all. Cripping offers a critical process, considering how certain bodily or mental experiences, in whatever location or period, have been marginalized or invisibilized, made pathological or deviant. Within queer theory, crip theory thus perhaps has its deepest affinity with queer of color critique, with its attention not just to substantive identities but also to processes of racialization and gendering that pathologize or make aberrant particular groups. Queer theory, queer of color critique, and crip theory, moreover, often combine studies that focus on a macrolevel recognition of the complex workings of political economy (neoliberal capitalism, in particular) and the seemingly microlevel vicissitudes of identity, embodiment, or desire.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure (b. 1857–d. 1913, Geneva) is widely recognized as the founder of modern theoretical linguistics. In his courses in general linguistics he taught at Geneva in 1907–1911—made known to a broad audience as Cours de linguistique générale (CLG, 1916), a book published posthumously under Saussure’s name on the basis of his lectures—Saussure laid out an approach to language whose premises largely followed principles of the turn-of-the-20th-century revolution in philosophy and methodology of science. Defining the object of a field of scholarly studies by postulating its features relevant specifically for that field was the center point of antipositivist critique. Saussure strove to wrestle linguistic studies from empiricism by laying out postulates concerning its nature that should stand as guidelines for its scholarly description. He defined “language” (la langue) as an internalized system of symbolic units (signs), defined by their intrasystemic relations, in contradistinction to “speech” (la parole) as the empirical speech activity. According to Saussure, signs of language are arbitrary, in the sense that the relation between their physical and symbolic distinction from each other has no other grounds but convention. Yet another foundational principle concerned the distinction between “synchrony” as the intrasystemic state of la langue at a given moment and “diachrony” as its development in time. The ideas of CLG gave rise to various strains of European linguistic “structuralism” (i.e., an approach to language from the point of view of its inner structure, as proposed by Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Roman Jakobson, Émile Benveniste, and Louis Hjelmslev); they also influenced parallel developments in America (Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Zellig Harris). Eventually, principles of structuralism spread out to various domains of cultural and social studies, from poetics (Jakobson, Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, Tzvetan Todorov) to anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss) and psychology (Jean Piaget). While generative grammar (Noam Chomsky) posited itself as an opponent of structuralism, it upheld some fundamental premises of the CLG; first of all, the transempirical and systemic nature of the internalized language “competence.” Beginning in the late 1960s, structuralism became the target of far-reaching critique, particularly in the domains of literary theory (Roland Barthes, Western reception of Mikhail Bakhtin), philosophy of language and culture (Jacques Derrida), and history of ideas (Michel Foucault). At about the same time, Saussure’s copious private notes on linguistics, of which hitherto only a small part had been known, came to scholars’ attention. As a consequence, CLG came under a double-critical fire: as the presumed harbinger of the now-deflated structural approach, and as a work of dubious authenticity whose text, produced by the book’s editors, ostensibly did not reflect Saussure’s views properly. Saussure’s image as a philosopher of language largely overshadowed his works in other areas, despite their considerable value in their own right. Saussure began his academic career as a specialist in comparative grammar of Indo-European languages. His early book on the reconstruction of the proto-European system of vowels (1879) produced a sensation at the time and made a strong impact on the development of that discipline in the next century. In the 1900s, Saussure was intensely involved in studies of the “anagram”; the discovery in the 1960s of his notes on the subject created a broad if somewhat controversial resonance.

Reader Response Theory

This annotated bibliography presents influential work in the area of reader response theory. While providing an overview of major research in the area of reader response, the annotated bibliography also provides current research representing various categories of reader response. The citations are organized by their dominant characteristics although there may be some overlap across categories.

Leo Tolstoy

Count Leo Tolstoy (Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy) is one of the greatest writers of all time. Born in Yasnaya Polyana on 9 September 1828 (28 August, Old Style) to Count Tolstoy and Princess Volkonsky, he lived a long, eventful life and became the father of a large family. War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, and many other famous texts garnered Tolstoy the admiration of readers well beyond Russia. From as early as the 1880s, the home estate of the author became a beacon for the entire world, as the prophetic force of Tolstoy’s personality compelled him to stand up for justice and promote nonviolence, social and economic equality, and a new type of art. In works of radical nonfiction like A Confession; The Kingdom of God Is Within You, “The Law of Violence and the Law of Love,” and What Is Art? Tolstoy solidified his reputation as much more than a towering literary figure. The tsarist government banned most of these nonliterary writings, heavily censored his artistic works, and arrested or exiled his followers. In 1901, the Russian Orthodox Church issued a determination to excommunicate Tolstoy for his seditious views. Despising the establishment, Tolstoy cared little that from 1902 to 1906 he received multiple nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature, yet won none, or that he was equally unsuccessful in winning the Nobel Prize for Peace, for which he was nominated three times (1901, 1902, 1910). At the age of eighty-two, plagued by disputes in his family and among his disciples about his intention to grant free copyright to the entire corpus of his written works, he resolved to leave home, and he died on 20 November 1910 (7 November, Old Style) during his escape. Hundreds of thousands of works in many languages have been written about Tolstoy over the last 165 years, the first 383-page-long bibliography of literature on him having appeared seven years before his death. For too long, Tolstoy scholars tended to downplay the importance of the author’s thought (his “nonartistic” side) and deny that anything was to be gained in studying his sociopolitical, religious, and philosophical views comprehensively. However, this trend in criticism has steadily declined since the beginning of the new millennium. Today, approaches to the study of Tolstoy go beyond literary studies. He is considered a thinker as much as a writer—the two are inseparable in his work—and Tolstoy has left a strong intellectual imprint on world culture. Eleven decades after his death, his ideas are seen as no less than a measure of the state of the world, not just of its state of culture or of the quality of its civilization, but also of its most vital signs.

Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all people are “citizens of the world” (Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, under General Overviews) and can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, with the addition of the Egyptian pharaoh, Akhanoton (“The Greek Origins of the Idea of Cosmopolitanism,” cited under Influence and Origins). With increasing global interconnectedness thanks to technological advancements, the ideology of cosmopolitanism is perhaps now more relevant than ever before. Thanks to thinkers and writers such as Immanuel Kant, Francisco de Vitoria, Anthony Kwame Appiah, and Martha Nussbaum, to name a few, cosmopolitanism and its implications continue to influence theoretical visions of society, politics, economics, education, literature, and art.

Karl-Otto Apel

Karl-Otto Apel (b. 1922–d. 2017) was one of the most original, influential, and renowned German philosophers of the post–World War II generation. He is credited with what is known as the linguistification of Kantian transcendental philosophy, in general, and the linguistic transformation of philosophy in Germany, in particular. His name is closely associated with that of Jürgen Habermas, his junior colleague, whom he met as a graduate student in Bonn in the 1950s, and with whom he maintained a lengthy philosophical collaboration. He received his doctorate in 1950 with a dissertation titled Dasein und Erkennen: Eine erkenntnistheoretische Interpretation der Philosophie Martin Heideggers (translated as: “Dasein and knowledge: An epistemological interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy”). However, as early as the 1950s, Apel had become increasingly critical of the relativistic and historicist consequences of his phenomenological and hermeneutical work. In 1962, he presented his Habilitation at the University of Mainz, which was published in 1963 as Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico (translated as: “The idea of language in the traditions of humanism from Dante to Vico”). This book is a pioneering reconstruction of the Italian philosophy of language and how it laid the foundations for the different currents of the philosophy of language that would branch out in the modern philosophies of language. In 1965, Apel published “Die Entfaltung der ‘sprachanalytischen’ Philosophie und das Problem der ‘Geisteswissenchaften,’” which was translated into English as Analytic Philosophy of Language and the “Geisteswissenschaften” in 1967. This was the first work of Apel to be translated into English, but it is also emblematic of Apel’s pioneering engagement with “analytic” philosophy. In 1973, at the urging of Habermas, Apel published Transformation der Philosophie (Transformation of philosophy) in two volumes. A selection, mostly from the second volume, appeared in 1983 under the title Towards a Transformation of Philosophy. In this work Apel introduced the idea that would become the hallmark of his thinking: The Apriori of the Community of Communication, by which he meant that the conditions of possibility of all knowledge and interaction are already given in every natural language that belongs to a community of speakers, who are per force already entangled in normative relations, that can never be circumvented or negated lest one commit a performative self-contradiction. In 1975, Apel published Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce: Eine Einführung in den amerikanischen Pragmatismus (The intellectual path of Charles S. Peirce: An introduction to American pragmatism), which is made up of the lengthy introduction he had written for his two-volume German selection and translation of Peirce’s writings. His next most important book was Diskurs und Verantwortung: Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral (translated as: “Discourse and responsibility: The problem of the transition to a postconventional morality”), from 1988, a collection of essays in which Apel develops his own version of discourse ethics. Apel’s last three books are collections of essays: Auseinandersetzungen in Erprobung des transzendentalpragmatischen Ansatzes (1998) [Confrontations: Testing the transcendental-pragmatic proposal) (It should be noted that Auseinandersetzungen, one of Apel’s favorite words, could also be translated as “coming to terms” with a particular thinker. This is an important volume as in three extensive essays Apel discusses his differences with and departures from Habermas’s version of universal pragamatics.); Paradigmen der Ersten Philosophie: Zur reflexiven–transzendentalpragmatischen Rekonstruktion der Philosophiegeschichte (2011) (translated as: “Paradigms of first philosophy: Toward a reflexive-transcendental-pragmatic reconstruction of the history of philosophy”), and Transzendentale Reflexion und Geschichte (2017) (translated as: Transcendental reflection and history”).

Dalit Literature

Dalit Literature is at once the expression of a “Dalit consciousness” about identity (both individual and communal), human rights and human dignity, and the community, as well as the discursive supplement to a ground-level sociopolitical movement that seeks redress for historically persistent oppression and social justice in the present. While its origins are often deemed to be coterminous with the movement dating back to the reformist campaigns in several parts of India during the 19th century, contemporary researchers have found precursors to both the Dalit consciousness and literary expressions in poets and thinkers of earlier eras, such as the saint-poets in the Punjab. Dalit literature’s later development has also run alongside political movements such as the Indian freedom struggle, even as B. R. Ambedkar’s campaign on behalf of what were then called the “depressed classes” intersected, sometimes fractiously, with the Indian National Congress, Mahatma Gandhi, and others in the struggle. Ambedkar’s own voluminous writings and speeches, tracts of various social and reformer organizations, debates, and letters also stimulated the literary. This bibliography includes primary texts in terms of foundational writings by B. R. Ambedkar, Jotirao Phule. and Periyar, followed by select examples of Dalit life writing, fiction, poetry, and anthologies that have brought together some of these texts. Later sections include critical-academic texts that cover some of the contexts, history, and development of Dalit literature. With more poetry, autobiographies, commentaries, anthologies, and compilations of Dalit texts appearing through the 20th century, the foundation for academic studies of the field of Dalit literature were also laid. Contextualizing Dalit texts in many cases, the essays and books listed here represent a wide variety of approaches. The contexts invariably involve the Dalit movement; the campaigns from the late 19th century; the various social, cultural, and political associations; the rise of Ambedkar and his influence; and other subjects. Many link Dalit narratives to other cultural productions, iconography, and practices. Others focus on the intersection of caste and class/political economy and capitalist modernity in the postcolonial state, or caste and patriarchy. And some others, working with Dalit literature from particular languages, offer a history of Dalit literature in that language. The role of this literature in shaping not only political mobilization but also the social imaginary of the Dalit communities and the public sphere are also key components of the protocols of reading and receiving Dalit texts engendered in the academic and cultural discussions around the domain. Aesthetics, politics, genre conventions, influences and the “voice” of resistance, anger, and despair are part of the discussion in many essays. Others offer comparative studies of Dalit texts. Read variously as the literature of protest, sympathy, solidarity, and resistance, Dalit literature thrives in Indian languages, and in multiple forms, although oral narratives and stories that are popular in gatherings and meetings remain largely uncollected. New forms such as the graphic novel have energized the field in recent years.

Affect Studies

Across and between political, cultural, literary, and media theory; feminist, Black, queer/trans, and disability studies; neurohumanities; critical anthropologies and geographies; ethnographic or other compositional methods; performance pedagogies; and empiricist philosophies, the notion of “affect” shifts the impetus of study toward imbrications of body and world that move at the fringes of attention, overwhelm description, or have historically been neglected. The word “affect” holds a glut of meanings in generative drift: from emotion, feeling, mood, sensation, and vibe to action, atmosphere, capacity, force, intensity, potential, or relation. Affect studies attend to those near-imperceptible, too-intense, interstitial, or in-the-making visceral forces and feelings that accompany and broker the entangled material—especially bodily—and conceptual potentials of an emergent or historical phenomenon. Affect can be invoked in the singular to gesture at an indivisible field of affecting intensities or as plural affects to give contour to specificities of event or encounter and vectors of experience. It is a rangy term that resists any easy genealogical tack, with roots spanning philosophy, psychoanalysis, and later, cultural studies. Myriad non-Western ways of knowing have long been alert to the unruliness of world- and subject-making forces beyond the capture of stratifying knowledge formations. As such, historicizing affect as a field of study hazards mistaking the citational scaffolding and circulation of a galvanizing instance of critical theory for a heterogeneity of approaches to a world in flux and wider-ranging notions of subjectivity. At base, and with political and ethical implications for subjectivity and knowledge work, affect studies short-circuit inherited representational schemes in the temporary bracketing-out of categories like cognition, intentionality, or language (as delimited from a wider field of emergence) in order to inquire of the forces and feelings that ongoingly make and are made by human, nonhuman, nonliving, and incorporeal bodies in movement, impasse, and encounter. From new materialist political ecologies to feminist of color cultural politics of emotion, affect studies rewire and disrupt configurations of and connections between the sciences and humanities, working ethologically and pedagogically to home in on the harnessing and sedimenting felt intensities that characterize an event, process, or set of relations, all the while stretching disciplinary problematics and methods. Affect calls into question the taken-for-granted status of the human and the body in science, theory, literature, and media. It is an analytic of power that takes capacities of affecting and being affected—and how such capacities are written into variously configured theoretical frameworks—as relentlessly political and informing constructions of race, sex, gender, ability, and debt. As a constellation of texts, sensibilities, theoretical stylings, and methods, affect’s ambit of expression is capacious: politicizing philosophies of immanence; writing with the always-shifting interface of bodies, knowledges, and their surrounds; and attuning to everyday vicissitudes entangled in wider forcefields of nature, culture, or technology. Given affect’s reach, this bibliography is not comprehensive but aims instead to give a sense of the theoretical and interdisciplinary liveliness of affect inquiry.

Arjun Appadurai

Arjun Appadurai (b. 1949), currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work draws on the methods and theories of anthropology, history, political economy, and cultural studies. His scholarship, while originally rooted in area studies of South Asia, encompasses programmatic work aimed at formulating conceptual rubrics and questions to guide comparative and critical cultural studies of globalization, development, politics, and economy. He writes for audiences of scholars, creative practitioners, and activists, and for a broader public. A central intervention has been his framing of globalization in ways that privilege the work of imagination and futurity in its constituent processes and institutions; to this end, he has emphasized the mobility of ideas, images, finance, and persons and the durable domains of translocal interaction (e.g., ethnoscapes, finanscapes) that such mobility produces, while downplaying the territorial and cultural fixity of nation-states and localities. A signature rubric, “public culture,” advanced in his own work and especially in the journal of that name, co-founded and co-edited with his late wife, Carol Breckenridge, captures the malleable, contested, and multiply mediated notion of culture that underlies this understanding of globalization. This conception of culture is also meant to signal how hope and aspiration may be articulated with everyday worlds of meaning and action. Over the past four decades, his published work has encompassed books and edited collections, journal articles, chapters, and commentaries. Much of that work has derived from collaborative projects involving both original research and editorial activities, several associated with the journal, Public Culture, and with the Cultures of Finance Working Group, based at New York University. Appadurai also co-founded, with Carol Breckenridge, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research), a Mumbai-based research collective that works with urban Indian communities who are grappling with local impacts of urbanization and globalization. Appadurai’s ideas about culture, globalization, development, commodification, identity politics, and postcolonialism have influenced scholarship in many fields, from his own core disciplines to media and communications studies, postcolonial studies, architecture, urban studies, and political theory.