1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910778058203321

Autore

Liu Alan <1953->

Titolo

Local transcendence [[electronic resource] ] : essays on postmodern historicism and the database / / Alan Liu

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, c2008

ISBN

9786612239724

1-282-23972-4

0-226-48697-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (405 p.)

Disciplina

801/.950904

Soggetti

Criticism - History - 20th century

Criticism - History - 21st century

Historicism

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [333]-359) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Contingent Methods -- 1. The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism -- 2. Trying Cultural Criticism: Wordsworth and Subversion -- 3. Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail -- 4. Remembering the Spruce Goose: Historicism, Postmodernism, Romanticism -- 5. The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning -- 6. The Interdisciplinary War Machine -- 7. Sidney's Technology: A Critique by Technology of Literary History -- 8. Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse -- 9. Escaping History: The New Historicism, Databases, and Contingency -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today's society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present-the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen. Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history. In the essays collected in Local Transcendence, Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries:



postmodern cultural criticism-including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory-and digital information technology. What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, Liu asks, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicism? Local Transcendence includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.