Synopses & Reviews
T.V. Reed urges an affiliation between literary theory and political actionand 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 genresAgee 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 1980sReed 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.
Synopsis
"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.