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Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics And The Poetics Of American Social Movementsby Thomas Vernon Reed Download Book (Respecting the intellectual property of others is utmost important to us, we make every effort to make sure we only link to legitimate sites, such as those sites owned by authors and publishers. If you have any questions about these links, please contact us.) link 1 About Book From Library Journal Combining the insights of the New Historicism, rhetorical criticism, and Fredric Jameson's definition of postmodernism and the commodification of culture, Reed makes a significant contribution to cultural poetics by problematizing the relation of aesthetics and politics. In his first chapter, he develops a "postmodernist realism"--a strategy that transgresses conventional boundaries of textuality and representation to demonstrate the deeply political nature of contemporary literary theory and modern social movements. In subsequent chapters, Reed uses this approach to perform insightful critical readings of "texts" as diverse as the Gay Rights Movement, the Women's Pentagon Action, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1989), and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . Along with Giles Gunn's Thinking Across the American Grain ( LJ 1/92) and Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke Univ. Pr., 1991), Reed's book offers a way beyond the impasse of much contemporary cultural theory. Highly recommended for academic libraries. - Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., Ohio Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Book Description T.V. Reed urges an affiliation between literary theory and political action--and between political action and literary theory. What can the "new literary theory" learn from "new social movements"; and what can social activists learn from poststructuralism, new historicism, feminist theory, and neomarxism? In strikingly new interpretations of texts in four different genres--Agee and Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ellison's Invisible Man, Mailer's Armies of the Night, and the ecofeminist Women's Pentagon Actions of the early 1980s--Reed shows how reading literary texts for their political strategies and reading political movements as texts can help us overcome certain rhetorical traps that have undermined American efforts to combat racism, sexism, and economic inequality. From the Inside Flap "An extraordinarily ambitious effort of synthesis, worthy of comparison with the synthesis attempted a decade ago by Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious. This book speaks in a fresh voice, a voice that clearly knows all of the most interesting thinking on the politics of culture over the past few years yet is stimulated rather than burdened by its knowledge. It will be welcomed with exhilaration by the large and ever-increasing audience for the theory and practice of cultural studies as well as, I'm convinced, by an unusually broad general readership. No one thinking about the complex relations between aesthetics and politics will be able to ignore it."--Bruce Robbins, editor of Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics From the Back Cover "An extraordinarily ambitious effort of synthesis, worthy of comparison with the synthesis attempted a decade ago by Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious. This book speaks in a fresh voice, a voice that clearly knows all of the most interesting thinking on the politics of culture over the past few years yet is stimulated rather than burdened by its knowledge. It will be welcomed with exhilaration by the large and ever-increasing audience for the theory and practice of cultural studies as well as, I'm convinced, by an unusually broad general readership. No one thinking about the complex relations between aesthetics and politics will be able to ignore it." (Bruce Robbins, editor of Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics) About the Author T.V. Reed is Assistant Professor of American Studies and English at Washington State University. Related Free eBooks
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