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5 books match the query 'Fenves, Peter'

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Archaeology and Its Avatars

Jorge Coronado, Alexander Herrera Wassilowsky

Northwestern University Press, 2026

Illuminating the impact of archaeology on the culture and politics of Latin America

Since the mid-nineteenth century, archaeology has played a critical role in historicizing space and shaping cultural imaginaries. It has brought modern scientific practices into structured contact with ancient objects and landscapes, on the one hand, and modern Indigenous cultures in their material and historical complexity, on the other. Archaeology has thus served a variety of disciplines and practices, from history and anthropology to literary and social criticism and critical theory, and has actively animated practices quite distinct from itself, such as public policy, tourism, urban planning, art, literature, and nation-building.

This volume provides a unique analysis of a disciplinary formation crucial to the study of cultural history and theory in Latin America. The contributors represent archaeologists and scholars from a variety of disciplines within the humanities, each of whom approaches archaeology as theory and praxis. Collectively, they map the differences and similarities between archaeological interventions and the ways in which the materiality, practice, and discourse of archaeology have been taken up as analytic, metaphor, and discursive strategy.

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Points of Departure

Samuel Weber between Spectrality and Reading

Edited by Peter Fenves, Kevin McLaughlin, and Marc Redfield

Northwestern University Press, 2016

Since the late 1960s, when he introduced Theodor Adorno’s work on literature and cultural critique to an English-speaking public, Samuel Weber has stimulated the discovery of new and unexpected links within a broad spectrum of humanistic disciplines, including critical theory and psychoanalysis, media studies and literary analysis, continental philosophy and theater studies. The international group of scholars who contribute to Points of Departure demonstrate the persistent fecundity of Weber’s work. Centered around his essay on the Ghost of Hamlet, as reflected in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, the volume is broadly divided into explorations of the nature of spectrality, on the one hand, and the dynamics of reading, on the other. Each of the twelve essays thus takes its point of departure from “Weber’s singular path between languages, cultures, and traditions”—to quote Jacques Derrida, whose fictive “interview with a passing journalist” is published here for the first time.

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Reading Ronell

Edited by Diane Davis

University of Illinois Press, 2008

Avital Ronell has won worldwide acclaim for her work across literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and popular culture, political theory and feminism, art and rhetoric, drugs and deconstruction. In works such as The Test Drive, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Telephone Book, she has perpetually raised new and powerful questions about how we think, what thinking does, and how we fool ourselves about the troubled space between thought and action.

In this collection, some of today's most distinguished and innovative thinkers turn their attention to Ronell's teaching, writing, and provocations, observing how Ronell reads and what comes from reading her. By reading Ronell, and reading Ronell reading, contributors examine the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations and carefully explicate, extend, and explore the paraconcepts addressed in her works.

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