Synopses & Reviews
“In response to the noisy world of contemporary theory, Kavanagh has assembled a provocative collection of essays by critics and philosophers who share the conviction that there is a limit beyond which the drive to theorize transforms theory into something different from what it presents itself as being. . . . Limits attempts with considerable success to strike a delicate balance between critiquing theoretical excess and defending theorys usefulness.”—Scott Sprenger, Modern Language Notes
Synopsis
A Stanford University Press classic.
Synopsis
This collection of eight essays by some of today's most innovative and seminal thinkers argues that there is a limit beyond which the enterprise of literary theory becomes something different from what it presents itself as being. These writers ask, in different ways, how theory functions and how it might preserve within its own practices and effects the freedom of reading, the presence of the real, and the challenge of a voice speaking outside the rhetorics of mastery.
Table of Contents
Panoptic theory / Michel Serres -- The quandaries of the referent / Vincent Descombes -- Reality and the untheorizable / Clâement Rosset -- On reading again / Franðcois Roustang -- The gesture of criticism / Roy Roussel -- Nostalgia and critical theory / Josuâe Harari -- Film theory and the two imaginaries / Thomas M. Kavanagh -- Theory and its terrors / Renâe Girard.