Transformations in Personhood and Culture After Theory: The Languages of History, Aesthetics, and Ethics (Literature and Philosophy) - Softcover

The essays in this collection focus on the essentially moral desire within humanistic inquiry to seek a point of contact between personal experience and intellectual reflection. The book is concerned with the development of a plural vocabulary of transformation that stems from the language of historians, philosophers, feminists, and aestheticians. It delineates a significant and widespread change in intellectual perspective that resists homogenizing the objects of study to abstract conceptual models and structures. What emerges from this volume are personal, responsible, situated languages that engage intellectuals after the waves of abstract theory of the past twenty years. Contents Christie McDonald and Gary Wihl/Preface Nancy F. Partner/History Without Empiricism/Truth Without Facts Judith Schlanger/How Old Is Our Cultural Past? Isabelle Stengers/The Humor of the Present Nancy Austin/Naming the Landscape: Leisure Travel and the Demise of the Salon Karsten Harries/Beauty, Language, and Re-Presentation: Notes Toward a Critique of Aesthetics--With Special Reference to Architecture Mary Ann Caws/Making Space: For a Poetry of Architecture Charles Altieri/Intentionality Without Interiority: Wittgenstein and the Dynamics of Subjective Agency Jacques Schlanger/Changing One's Beliefs Rosi Braidotti/Theories of Gender Sarah Westphal/Stories of Gender Mary Bittner Wiseman/Three Renaissance Madonnas: Freud and the Feminine

Christie McDonald is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and author of The Proustian Fabric (1991). Gary Wihl is Associate Professor of English at McGill University.