Subverting the Canon: Sociology, New Historicism, and Cultural Studies

This article discusses the topic of violence within the framework of cultural criticism. More specifically, it asks whether a scrutiny of the concept of the event (événement) in Gilles Deleuze’s and Alain Badiou’s different conceptions could provide new insights into today’s paradigm of cultural criticism and its access to violence as phenomenon. For both thinkers, the event causes a rupture in the existing order of discourse and could thus shed light upon the limits of cultural criticism as well as on the elusive “essence” of violence. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s conceptual framework, the last part of the article expands the discussion to include the critical field of New Historicism, which arguably shares a “programmatic inclusiveness” with both Cultural Studies and cultural criticism. As part of this expansion, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning brings about a discussion of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, a discussion that serves to illustrate the contrasts between the real violence of Badiou and the baroque fold of Deleuze, i.e. the vacuity (vide) of Badiou’s event versus the affirmative plenitude of Deleuze’s philosophy. Holbein’s painting thus serves to highlights the “parallax view” that might be the vantage point to access violence as the repressed other of today’s cultural criticism.

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The Later Twentieth Century: New Historicism, Reader-Response Theory, Postcolonial Criticism, Cultural Studies

Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present ◽

10.1002/9781444328004.ch18 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 264-278

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Cultural Studies ◽

Reader Response ◽

New Historicism ◽

Response Theory ◽

Reader Response Theory ◽

Postcolonial Criticism

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Freshlyground and the possibilities of new identities in post-apartheid South Africa

The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa ◽

10.4102/td.v8i1.9 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Robert Balfour

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

South Africa ◽

Cultural Studies ◽

Popular Music ◽

South African ◽

Contemporary Music ◽

New Historicism ◽

Popular Art ◽

Critical Attention ◽

Art Forms

Popular music and indeed popular art forms struggle for critical attention in the academy (Larkin, 1992). Relegated to a focus on performance, or to peripheral sub-disciplines such as cultural studies, the study of popular art forms is risky terrain in higher education (Wicke, 1990). Instead, and particularly within the humanities, it has been claimed that the study of canonised art forms (Viljoen & Van Der Merwe, 2004) may enable the student to analyse a range of texts with equal skill and superior insight. This paper deals with both the popular and the interdisciplinary in relation to a theorisation of the lyrics of popular South African contemporary music group Freshlyground and the possibilities for a post-Apartheid identity explored in these lyrics through the theoretical lenses of New Historicism and Cosmopolitanism.

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What Matters Who Hears? Edmund Wilson and the Pragmatics of Literary Critical Discourse

Modernist Cultures ◽

10.3366/e2041102209000422 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 208-221

Author(s):

Joshua Kates

Keyword(s):

Cultural Studies ◽

Critical Discourse ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Literary Discourse ◽

New Historicism ◽

Ideology Critique ◽

What Is Said ◽

Or History ◽

The Way ◽

What Matters

Attention to literature, it is commonly believed, is attention to how what is said is said, along with what is said. Whether understood as New Critical irony, deconstructive textuality, the referential density of literary discourse in the new historicism, or the overdetermined signifier of cultural studies and ideology critique, the foregrounding of the way in which discourse comes to expression - to the point of breaking the confines of the volume and surmounting the identity of the author - distinguishes literature as an object, and literary studies as a discipline, from all others, such as philosophy or history.

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Recent Trends in the Study of Midrash and Rabbinic Narrative

Currents in Biblical Research ◽

10.1177/1476993x08099545 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 272-293

Author(s):

Carol Bakhos

Keyword(s):

Cultural Studies ◽

Present Article ◽

Final Section ◽

Literary Analysis ◽

New Historicism ◽

Unfinished Business ◽

Critical Editions ◽

Recent Trends

The present article surveys some significant developments in scholarship on rabbinic midrash and narrative (aggadic) sources. The contemporary trends in the study of midrash can be traced back to the work of Jacob Neusner in the early 1970s. This article traces developments from that time, and does so by isolating trends in (1) literary analysis, (2) cultural studies, and (3) new historicism. A final section (4) looks at equally important developments concerning still unfinished business of producing critical editions of rabbinic texts.

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