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A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter—and about why ideas matter. Borrowing from Flaubert's notion of a dictionary of “received ideas” and Raymond Williams's explorations of the “keywords” of the modern age, Jay investigates some of the central concepts by which we currently organize our thoughts and lives. His topics range from “theory” and “experience” to the meaning of “multiculturalism” and the dynamics of cultural “subversion.” Among the thinkers he engages are Bataille and Foucault, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Walter Benjamin, Christa Wolf, and Jean-François Lyotard. 

By looking closely at what “words do and perform,” Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. By helping to distance us from much that we now take for granted, he makes it difficult for us to remain comfortably certain about what we think we know. 

Elegantly written and richly insightful, this is a work of cultural criticism and intellectual analysis of the first order.

Tracing multivalent words of nineteenth-century French print culture

The production of printed text changed radically over the course of the nineteenth century: Everything from the material used to make paper to the gender of the people assembling books shifted. Examining ten key terms as they took on new meanings in the world of print, Cary Hollinshead-Strick shows how the words, borrowed to name technical transformations, reveal the social expectations surrounding the birth of industrial print culture. Through these homonyms she connects papermaking to both Renaissance ceramics and fin-de-siècle japonisme, reveals the politics behind typos and the reasons women went to work in Parisian suburbs, shows how newspaper formats mapped onto rural and urban forms of entertainment and food, and explores the fantasy that information itself could be gathered and distributed in reliable, comprehensive ways.

By lingering over the resonances set in motion when ordinary words like canard and filet became terms for modern media formats, this book situates communication practices in the social, economic, and political environments that gave rise to them. This innovative approach not only elucidates nineteenth-century French print culture’s influence on the literature of the period but also invites us to consider the relationships between contemporary forms of information, media, labor, and language.