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546 books match the query 'Semiotics & Theory' and 13 start with l

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Late Colonial Sublime

G. S. Sahota

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Taking cues from Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary writings on literary-historical method, Late Colonial Sublime reconstellates the dialectic of Enlightenment across a wide imperial geography, with special focus on the fashioning of neo-epics in Hindi and Urdu literary cultures in British India. Working through the limits of both Marxism and postcolonial critique, this book forges an innovative approach to the question of late romanticism and grounds categories such as the sublime within the dynamic of commodification. While G. S. Sahota takes canonical European critics such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to the outskirts of empire, he reads Indian writers such as Muhammad Iqbal and Jayashankar Prasad in light of the expansion of instrumental rationality and the neotraditional critiques of the West it spurred at the onset of decolonization.

By bringing together distinct literary canons—both metropolitan and colonial, hegemonic and subaltern, Western and Eastern, all of which took shape upon the common realities of imperial capitalism—Late Colonial Sublime takes an original dialectical approach. It experiments with fragments, parallaxes, and constellational form to explore the aporias of modernity as well as the possible futures they may signal in our midst. A bold intervention into contemporary debates that synthesizes a wealth of sources, this book will interest readers and scholars in world literature, critical theory, postcolonial criticism, and South Asian studies.

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Late Derrida, Volume 106

Ian Balfour , ed.

Duke University Press, 0

This special issue of SAQ commemorates and interrogates—with varying measures of appreciation and critique—the late work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Resisting simple memorialization of Derrida since his death in 2004, this collection contends that the late work of this prolific theorist remains to be better understood. The contributors explore the peculiar intensity—a combined sense of both patience and urgency—that characterizes Derrida’s late writing, suggestive, among other things, of his preoccupation with mortality, of time running out, and of so many pressing things to be done.

The essays address a wide array of Derrida’s concerns: human rights, justice, religion, the performative, “the gift of death,” mourning, and sovereignty. They often put Derrida’s texts in conjunction with the works of others—Wordsworth, Agamben, Schelling, and Benjamin, to name a few—that resonate with and on occasion resist Derrida’s own thinking and writing. One essay offers a reading of Wordsworth’s elegy “Distressful gift!” as a dialogue with questions posed by Derrida, using as its frame the kind of nonnormative mourning that Derrida advocated, together with a haunting analysis of the character of survival. Other essays look at Derrida’s theory of performativity as advanced in his late works, continuing his emphasis on the power of language, and in general they emulate his vigilance in attending to force and violence everywhere.

Contributors. Ian Balfour, David L. Clark, Mary Jacobus, David E. Johnson, David Lloyd, J. Hillis Miller, Marc Redfield, Rei Terada, Elisabeth Weber

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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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Latinamericanism after 9/11

John Beverley

Duke University Press, 2011

In Latinamericanism after 9/11, John Beverley explores Latinamericanist cultural theory in relation to new modes of political mobilization in Latin America. He contends that after 9/11, the hegemony of the United States and the neoliberal assumptions of the so-called Washington Consensus began to fade in Latin America. At the same time, the emergence in Latin America of new leftist governments—the marea rosada or “pink tide”—gathered momentum. Whatever its outcome, the marea rosada has shifted the grounds of Latinamericanist thinking in a significant way. Beverley proposes new paradigms better suited to Latin America’s reconfigured political landscape. In the process, he takes up matters such as Latin American postcolonial and cultural studies, the relation of deconstruction and Latinamericanism, the persistence of the national question and cultural nationalism in Latin America, the neoconservative turn in recent Latin American literary and cultural criticism, and the relation between subalternity and the state. Beverley’s perspective flows out of his involvement with the project of Latin American subaltern studies, but it also defines a position that is in some ways postsubalternist. He takes particular issue with recent calls for a “posthegemonic” politics.

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Lenin Reloaded

Toward a Politics of Truth, sic vii

Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, eds.

Duke University Press, 2007

Lenin Reloaded is a rallying call by some of the world’s leading Marxist intellectuals for renewed attention to the significance of Vladimir Lenin. The volume’s editors explain that it was Lenin who made Karl Marx’s thought explicitly political, who extended it beyond the confines of Europe, who put it into practice. They contend that a focus on Lenin is urgently needed now, when global capitalism appears to be the only game in town, the liberal-democratic system seems to have been settled on as the optimal political organization of society, and it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than a modest change in the mode of production. Lenin retooled Marx’s thought for specific historical conditions in 1914, and Lenin Reloaded urges a reinvention of the revolutionary project for the present. Such a project would be Leninist in its commitment to action based on truth and its acceptance of the consequences that follow from action.

These essays, some of which are appearing in English for the first time, bring Lenin face-to-face with the problems of today, including war, imperialism, the imperative to build an intelligentsia of wage earners, the need to embrace the achievements of bourgeois society and modernity, and the widespread failure of social democracy. Lenin Reloaded demonstrates that truth and partisanship are not mutually exclusive as is often suggested. Quite the opposite—in the present, truth can be articulated only from a thoroughly partisan position.

Contributors. Kevin B. Anderson, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Sebastian Budgen, Alex Callinicos, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Stathis Kouvelakis, Georges Labica, Sylvain Lazarus, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lars T. Lih, Domenico Losurdo, Savas Michael-Matsas, Antonio Negri, Alan Shandro, Slavoj Žižek

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Lines of Flight

Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon

Stefan Mattessich

Duke University Press, 2002

For Thomas Pynchon, the characteristic features of late capitalism—the rise of the military-industrial complex, consumerism, bureaucratization and specialization in the workplace, standardization at all levels of social life, and the growing influence of the mass media—all point to a transformation in the way human beings experience time and duration. Focusing on Pynchon’s novels as representative artifacts of the postwar period, Stefan Mattessich analyzes this temporal transformation in relation not only to Pynchon’s work but also to its literary, cultural, and theoretical contexts.

Mattessich theorizes a new kind of time—subjective displacement—dramatized in the parody, satire, and farce deployed through Pynchon’s oeuvre. In particular, he is interested in showing how this sense of time relates to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Examining this movement as an instance of flight or escape and exposing the beliefs behind it, Mattessich argues that the counterculture’s rejection of the dominant culture ultimately became an act of self-cancellation, a rebellion in which the counterculture found itself defined by the very order it sought to escape. He points to parallels in Pynchon’s attempts to dramatize and enact a similar experience of time in the doubling-back, crisscrossing, and erasure of his writing. Mattessich lays out a theory of cultural production centered on the ethical necessity of grasping one’s own susceptibility to discursive forms of determination.

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Literary Theory

An Introduction

Terry Eagleton

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

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Literature and the Cognitive Revolution, Volume 23

Alan Richardson and Francis F. Steen

Duke University Press, 0

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Literature for Change

The Case for Literary Research Across Languages and Cultures

Edited by Charles Burdett, Joseph Ford, Godela Weiss-Sussex, and Naomi Wells

University of London Press, 2026

Highlighting efforts to address today’s most pressing social challenges through the study of texts in languages other than English.

Literature for Change examines how the study, production, circulation, and reception of literary texts in languages other than English contribute to addressing contemporary social challenges. Through eleven case studies across diverse languages and cultures, it analyzes the real-world impact of literary research, showing its relevance to sectors such as museums and heritage, the environmental and medical humanities, and the digital sphere. Combining hermeneutic and aesthetic approaches, the chapters demonstrate the value of varied methods, including theoretically grounded creative inquiry, and the connections between literary studies and other disciplines. The book affirms the importance of the field of modern languages and the continuing role of literary texts in shaping social and cultural life.

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Literature, Analytically Speaking

Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution

By Peter Swirski

University of Texas Press, 2010

In a new approach to interdisciplinary literary theory, Literature, Analytically Speaking integrates literary studies with analytic aesthetics, girded by neo-Darwinian evolution. Scrutinizing narrative fiction through a lens provided by analytic philosophy, revered literary theorist Peter Swirski puts new life into literary theory while fashioning a set of practical guidelines for critics in the interpretive trenches.

Dismissing critical inquirers who deny intention its key role in the study of literary reception, Swirski extends the defense of intentionality to art and to human behavior in general. In the process, Swirski takes stock of the recent work in evolutionary theory, arguing that the analysis of narrative truth may be grounded in the neo-Darwinian paradigm which forms the empirical backbone behind his analytic approach. Literature, Analytically Speaking provides a series of precepts designed to capture the ways in which we do interpret (and ought to interpret) works of literature. Reflecting a resounding shift from the poststructuralist paradigm, Swirski's lively and colorful presentation, backed up by a dazzling variety of examples and case studies, reconceptualizes the aesthetics of literature and literary studies.

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