Collection of essays which indicate the "complex constellation of greatly differing interpretive formations concerning the term postmodernism."

This book offers a thorough examination of the novels of Irmtraud Morgner (1933-1990), one of the most talented, compelling and overlooked writers within East German feminist and avant-garde circles. Using a combination of theoretical approaches - including Adorno's aesthetic theories and Bakhtinian analyses of dialogism and the carnivalesque - the author traces Morgner's engagement with postmodernist aesthetic strategies back to her efforts, beginning in the early 1970s, to pose questions about effective political practices. Morgner's work sheds new light on the fraught relationship between GDR intellectuals and the state, a hotly debated topic that marks most recent attempts to understand literary culture in the German Democratic Republic. Situating Morgner's fiction at the intersection of postmodern and feminist theory, this study also offers new evidence for viewing literature from the GDR as significantly more complex and aesthetically interesting than has been previously assumed.

What does postmodernism mean for the future of history? Can one still write history in postmodernity? To answer questions such as these, Ernst Breisach provides the first comprehensive overview of postmodernism and its complex relationship to history and historiography. Placing postmodern theories in their intellectual and historical contexts, he shows how they are part of broad developments in Western culture. Breisach sees postmodernism as neither just a fad nor a universal remedy. In clear and concise language, he presents and critically evaluates the major views on history held by influential postmodernists, such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and the new narrativists. Along the way, he introduces to the reader major debates among historians over postmodern theories of evidence, objectivity, meaning and order, truth, and the usefulness of history. He also discusses new types of history that have emerged as a consequence of postmodernism, including cultural history, microhistory, and new historicism. For anyone concerned with the postmodern challenge to history, both advocates and critics alike, On the Future of History will be a welcome guide.

This cutting-edge Companion is a comprehensive resource for the study of the modern American novel. Published at a time when literary modernism is being thoroughly reassessed, it reflects current investigations into the origins and character of the movement as a whole. Brings together 28 original essays from leading scholars Allows readers to orient individual works and authors in their principal cultural and social contexts Contributes to efforts to recover minority voices, such as those of African American novelists, and popular subgenres, such as detective fiction Directs students to major relevant scholarship for further inquiry Suggests the many ways that “modern”, “American” and “fiction” carry new meanings in the twenty-first century

A paperback reprint of a hardback originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1993, and derived from a conference held at Wellesley in 1990. It aims to represent a critical milestone in the cultural poetics movement, which lies at the intersection of New Historicism and classical studies.

Munich, notorious in recent history as the capital of the Nazi movement, is the site of Gavriel Rosenfeld's stimulating inquiry into the German collective memory of the Third Reich. Rosenfeld shows, with the aid of a wealth of photographs, how the city's urban form developed after 1945 in direct reflection of its inhabitants' evolving memory of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship. In the second half of the twentieth century, the German people's struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism has dramatically shaped nearly all dimensions of their political, social, and cultural life. The area of urban development and the built environment, little explored until now, offers visible evidence of the struggle. By examining the ways in which the people of Munich reconstructed the ruins of their historic buildings, created new works of architecture, dealt with surviving Nazi buildings, and erected new monuments to commemorate the horrors of the recent past, Rosenfeld identifies a spectrum of competing memories of the Nazi experience. Munich’s postwar development was the subject of constant controversy, pitting representatives of contending aesthetic and mnemonic positions against one another in the heated battle to shape the city’s urban form. Examining the debates between traditionalists, modernists, postmodernists, and critical preservationists, Rosenfeld shows that the memory of Nazism in Munich has never been "repressed" but has rather been defined by constant dissension and evolution. On balance, however, he concludes that Munich came to embody in its urban form a conservative view of the past that was inclined to diminish local responsibility for the Third Reich.

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.

"Untendentious and highly informative... " Virginia Quarterly Review ..". extremely useful and intellectually stimulating... " Seminar Zeitgeist in Babel vividly displays the confluence of discourse-formations concerning postmodernism as they take shape in the different disciplines of aesthetic mediums and philosophical discourse. The twenty contributors include Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, Clement Greenberg, Martin Jay, Charles Jencks, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and Richard Rorty. Other contributors are Charles Boone, Matei Calinescu, C. Barry Chabot, Erika Fischer-Lichte, David Hayman, Jost Hermand, Ingeborg Hoesterey, Peter Koslowski, Rosalind E. Krauss, Donald B. Kuspit, Stefano Rosso, Maureen Turim, and Gianni Vattimo."

Where are the women writers of color? Where are their theoretical voices? The fifteen contributors to Other Sisterhoods examine how women writers of color have contributed to the discourse of literary and cultural theory. They focus on the impact of key issues, such as social construction and identity politics, on the works of women writers of color, as well as how these women deal with differences relating to gender, class, race/ethnicity, and sexuality. The book also explores the ways women writers of color have created their own ethnopoetics within the arena of literary and cultural theory, helping to redefine the nature of theory itself.

This book is of interest for any reader wishing to explore the interface between literature, and critical and cultural theory. It investigates the notions of alterity which underlie the work of Lawrence Durrell and postmodernist theory. Grass (Irmgard Elsner Hunt).