BiblioVault - Books about Wegner, Phillip E.

Invoking Hope

Theory and Utopia in Dark Times

Phillip E. Wegner

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

An appeal for the importance of theory, utopia, and close consideration of our contemporary dark times

What does any particular theory allow us to do? What is the value of doing so? And who benefits? In Invoking Hope, Phillip E. Wegner argues for the undiminished importance of the practices of theory, utopia, and a deep and critical reading of our current situation of what Bertolt Brecht refers to as finsteren Zeiten, or dark times.

Invoking Hope was written in response to three events that occurred in 2016: the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia; the one hundredth anniversary of the founding text in theory, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics; and the rise of the right-wing populism that culminated in the election of Donald Trump. Wegner offers original readings of major interventions in theory alongside dazzling utopian imaginaries developed from classical Greece to our global present—from Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Sarah Ahmed, Susan Buck-Morss, and Jacques Lacan to such works as Plato’s Republic, W. E. B. Du Bois’s John Brown, Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, and more. Wegner comments on an expansive array of modernist and contemporary literature, film, theory, and popular culture.

With Invoking Hope, Wegner provides an innovative lens for considering the rise of right-wing populism and the current crisis in democracy. He discusses challenges in the humanities and higher education and develops strategies of creative critical reading and hope against the grain of current trends in scholarship.

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Late Theory

Fredric Jameson, or The Persistence of Reading

Phillip E. Wegner

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

A bold, dialectic engagement with Fredric Jameson’s thought

Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) is widely regarded as the most influential literary and cultural theorist of the past fifty years. The culmination of more than three decades of sustained engagement with Jameson’s work, Late Theory offers a critical response to his late writings, namely the final volumes of his “Poetics of Social Forms,” to develop an original and dialectical reading practice in conversation with his evolving thought.

Jameson’s final works bring renewed clarity to three foundational concerns that structure his intellectual legacy. These are the problem of periodization and the challenge of grasping the present as a historical category, the dangers posed by the rise of moralizing modes of critique in literary and cultural studies, and the radical interpretive potential unlocked by allegory and the semiotic method. Phillip E. Wegner shows how these late interventions mark not a conclusion but an extension of Jameson’s long-standing project: envisioning the dialectic as a living, collective form of reasoning—a “thought mode of the future” capable of transforming our lives.

At its core, Late Theory is a passionate argument for cultural and aesthetic education as a practice of solidarity and imagination. Foregrounding Jameson’s enduring effort to build heterogeneous communities of readers committed to shared inquiry, Wegner affirms the urgency of reading, teaching, and thinking together in a moment of crisis for the university and global culture.

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Life between Two Deaths, 1989-2001

U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties

Phillip E. Wegner

Duke University Press, 2009

Through virtuoso readings of significant works of American film, television, and fiction, Phillip E. Wegner demonstrates that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 fostered a unique consciousness and represented a moment of immense historical possibilities now at risk of being forgotten in the midst of the “war on terror.” Wegner argues that 9/11 should be understood as a form of what Jacques Lacan called the “second death,” an event that repeats an earlier “fall,” in this instance the collapse of the Berlin Wall. By describing 9/11 as a repetition, Wegner does not deny its significance. Rather, he argues that it was only with the fall of the towers that the symbolic universe of the Cold War was finally destroyed and a true “new world order,” in which the United States assumed disturbing new powers, was put into place.

Wegner shows how phenomena including the debate on globalization, neoliberal notions of the end of history, the explosive growth of the Internet, the efflorescence of new architectural and urban planning projects, developments in literary and cultural production, new turns in theory and philosophy, and the rapid growth of the antiglobalization movement came to characterize the long nineties. He offers readings of some of the most interesting cultural texts of the era: Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Joe Haldeman’s Forever trilogy; Octavia Butler’s Parable novels; the Terminator films; the movies Fight Club, Independence Day, Cape Fear, and Ghost Dog; and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In so doing, he illuminates fundamental issues concerning narrative, such as how beginnings and endings are recognized and how relationships between events are constructed.

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Periodizing Jameson

Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative

Phillip E. Wegner

Northwestern University Press, 2014

For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literary and cultural theory. In Periodizing Jameson, Phillip E. Wegner builds upon Jameson’s unique dialectical method to demonstrate the value of Jameson’s tools—periodization, the fourfold hermeneutic, and the Greimasian semiotic square, among others—and to develop virtuoso readings of Jameson’s own work and the history of the contemporary American university in which it unfolds.

Wegner shows how Jameson’s work intervenes in particular social, cultural, and political situations, using his scholarship both to develop original explorations of nineteenth-century fiction, popular films, and other promiment theorists, and to examine the changing fortunes of theory itself. In this way, Periodizing Jameson casts new light on the potential of and challenges to humanist intellectual work in the present.

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