In this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness. Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.

Critique and culture; the function of criticism - humanism and critique; the psychoanalytic critique of the subject; structuralism, semiotics and the critique of language; deconstruction, post-structuralism and the critique of philosophy; the critique of social relations; notes towards a definition of cultural studies.

For more than a decade Judith Newton has been at the forefront of defining and promoting materialist feminist criticism. Starting Over brings together a selection of her essays that chart the establishment of feminist literary criticism in the academy and its relation to other forms of cultural criticism, including Marxist, post-Marxist, new historicist, and cultural materialist approaches, as well as cultural studies. The essays in Starting Over have functioned as exemplars of interdisciplinary thinking, mapping out the ways in which reading strategies and the constructions of history, culture, identity, change, and agency in various materialist theories overlap, and the ways in which feminist-materialist work both draws upon, revises, and complicates the vision of nonfeminist materialist critiques. They are shaped by an awareness that public knowledge is always informed by the so-called private realm of familial and sexual relations and that cultural criticism must bring together investigations of daily behaviors, economic and social relations, and the dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexual struggle. Starting Over is a brilliant synthesis of literature, history, anthropology, the many influential trends in contemporary theory, and the politics of feminism.

Leitch argues for the use of poststructural theory in cultural criticism. He maintains that deconstruction remains crucial for a truly critical approach to cultural studies.

Why do critics feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What is the rationale for their conviction that language is always withholding some important truth, that the critic's task is to unearth what is unsaid, naturalized, or repressed? These are the features of critique, a mode of thought that thoroughly dominates academic criticism. In this book, Rita Felski brilliantly exposes critique's more troubling qualities and proposes alternatives to it. Critique, she argues, is not just a method but also a sensibility--one best captured by Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion." As the characteristic affect of critique, suspicion, Felski shows, helps us understand critique's seductions and limitations. The questions that Felski poses about critique have implications well beyond intramural debates among literary scholars. Literary studies, says Felski, is facing a legitimation crisis thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves the field struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? For Felski, the tendencies to make literary texts the object of suspicious reading or, conversely, impute to them qualities of critique, forecloses too many other possibilities. Felski offers an alternative model that she calls "postcritical reading." Rather than looking behind the text for its hidden causes, conditions, and motives, she suggests that literary scholars place themselves in front of a text, reflecting on what it calls forth and makes possible. Here Felski enlists the work of Bruno Latour to rethink reading as a co-production between actors, rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking. As a scholar with an abiding respect for theory who has long deployed elements of critique in her own work, Felski is able to provide an insider's account of critique's limits and alternatives that will resonate widely in the humanities.

Edward Tomarken's previous book, Filmspeak, was a study of literary theory in relation to contemporary mainstream films. Some of the abstruse ideas of early literary theorists (1950–70) had in fact permeated our thinking to such an extent that both films and theories enriched and shed light upon one another. One early response to Filmspeak was the question 'Why theory?’, a remark that provides the title of this new and exciting exploration of literature. In pursuit of an answer, Tomarken turns to the 'second generation' of critics (1970–2000), and analyses television programmes as well as films. He considers scholars such as Clifford Geertz and Martha Nussbaum who saw themselves as working in the field of cultural studies. Why theory? thus has a dual focus – on both culture and literary theory. The result of integrating cultural ideas with media interpretation sees Tomarken grapple with the question of the title: theory has become a part of our cultural life.

Force Fields collects the recent essays of Martin Jay, an intellectual historian and cultural critic internationally known for his extensive work on the history of Western Marxism and the intellectual migration from Germany to America.

Examines differences in taste between modern French classes, discusses the relationship between culture and politics, and outlines the strategies of pretension.

This book addresses a topic in journalism studies that has gained increasing scholarly attention since the mid-2000s: the coverage and evaluation of arts and culture, or what we term ‘cultural journalism and cultural critique’. The book highlights three approaches to this emerging research field: (1) the constant challenge of demarcating what constitutes the ‘cultural’ in cultural journalism and cultural critique, and the interlinks of cultural journalism and cultural critique; (2) the dialectic of globalization’s cultural homogenization and the specificity of local/national cultures; and (3) the need to rethink, perhaps even redefine, cultural journalism and cultural critique in view of the digital media landscape. ‘Cultural journalism’ is used as an umbrella term for media reporting and debating on culture, including the arts, value politics, popular culture, the culture industries, and entertainment. Therefore some of the contributions this book apply a broad approach to ‘the cultural’ when theorizing and analyzing the production and content of cultural journalism, and the professional ideology, self-perception, and legitimacy struggles of cultural journalists and editors. Other contributions demarcate their field of study more narrowly, both topically and generically, by engaging with very specific sub-areas such as ‘film criticism’ or ‘television series.’ This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Practice.