William V. Spanos

Bio: William V. Spanos is an academic researcher from Binghamton University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Shadow (psychology) & American exceptionalism. The author has an hindex of 14, co-authored 49 publications receiving 585 citations.

The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination

Abstract: ... All the plays that have And any explanation will satisfy: ever been written, from ancient We only ask to be reassured Greece to the present day, About the noises in the cellar have never really been anything And the window that should not have but thrillers, been open. Drama's always been realistic Why do we all behave as if the door and there's always been a might suddenly open, the detective about. Every curtain be drawn, play's an investigation brought The cellar make some dreadful to a successful conclusion, disclosure, the roof disappear, There's a riddle, and it's And we should cease to be sure of solved in the final scene. what is real or unreal? Sometimes Hold tight, hold tight, we must insist earlier. Might as well give the that the world is what we have game away at the always taken it to be. ... start.

The errant art of Moby-Dick : the canon, the Cold War, and the struggle for American studies

Abstract: In The Errant Art of Moby-Dick, one of America's most distinguished critics reexamines Melville's monumental novel and turns the occasion into a meditation on the history and implications of canon formation. In Moby-Dick-a work virtually ignored and discredited at the time of its publication-William V. Spanos uncovers a text remarkably suited as a foundation for a "New Americanist" critique of the ideology based on Puritan origins that was codified in the canon established by "Old Americanist" critics from F. O. Matthiessen to Lionel Trilling. But Spanos also shows, with the novel still as his focus, the limitations of this "New Americanist" discourse and its failure to escape the totalizing imperial perspective it finds in its predecessor. Combining Heideggerian ontology with a sociopolitical perspective derived primarily from Foucault, the reading of Moby-Dick that forms the center of this book demonstrates that the traditional identification of Melville's novel as a "romance" renders it complicitous in the discourse of the Cold War. At the same time, Spanos shows how New Americanist criticism overlooks the degree to which Moby-Dick anticipates not only America's self-representation as the savior of the world against communism, but also the emergent postmodern and anti-imperial discourse deployed against such an image. Spanos's critique reveals the extraordinary relevance of Melville's novel as a post-Cold War text, foreshadowing not only the self-destructive end of the historical formation of the American cultural identity in the genocidal assault on Vietnam, but also the reactionary labeling of the current era as "the end of history." This provocative and challenging study presents not only a new view of the development of literary history in the United States, but a devastating critique of the genealogy of ideology in the American cultural establishment.

End Of Education: Toward Posthumanism

Abstract: Humanist understanding and the onto-theo-logical tradition - the ideology of vision Humanist inquiry and the politics of the gaze The Apollonian investment of modern humanist educational theory - the examples of Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, and I. A. Richards The violence of disinterestedness - a genealogy of the educational "reform" initiative in the 1980s The university in the Vietnam decade - the "crisis of command" and the "refusal of spontaneous consent" The intellectual and the de-centered occasion - towards a posthumanist paedeia.

America'S Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire

Abstract: A study of imperialism that stretches from ancient Rome to the post-Cold War World, this provocative work boldly revises our assumptions about the genealogy of the West. Rather than locating its source in classical Greece, William V. Spanos argues, we should look to ancient Rome, which first articulated the ideas that would become fundamental to the West's imperial project. These founding ideas, he claims, have informed the American national identity and its foreign policy from its origins.

American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam

Abstract: In American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, William V. Spanos explores three writers--Graham Greene, Philip Caputo, and Tim O'Brien--whose work devastatingly critiques the U.S. intervention in Vietnam and exposes the brutality of the Vietnam War. Utilizing poststructuralist theory, particularly that of Heidegger, Althusser, Foucault, and Said, Spanos argues that the Vietnam War disclosed the dark underside of the American exceptionalist ethos and, in so doing, speaks directly to America's war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11. To support this argument, Spanos undertakes close readings of Greene's The Quiet American, Caputo's A Rumor of War, and O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, all of which bear witness to the self-destruction of American exceptionalism. Spanos retrieves the spectral witness that has been suppressed since the war, but that now, in the wake of the quagmire in Iraq, has returned to haunt America's post9/11 "project for the new American century."

Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses

Abstract: It ought to be of some political significance at least that the term 'colonization' has come to denote a variety of phenomena in recent feminist and left writings in general. From its analytic value as a category of exploitative economic exchange in both traditional and contemporary Marxisms (cf. particularly such contemporary scholars as Baran, Amin and Gunder-Frank) to its use by feminist women of colour in the US, to describe the appropriation of their experiences and struggles by hegemonic white women's movements,' the term 'colonization' has been used to characterize everything from the most evident economic and political hierarchies to the production of a particular cultural discourse about what is called the 'Third World.'2 However sophisticated or problematical its use as an explanatory construct, colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a discursive or political suppression of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question. What I wish to analyse here specifically is the production of the 'Third World Woman' as a singular monolithic subject in some recent (western) feminist texts. The definition of colonization I invoke is a predominantly discursive one, focusing on a certain mode of appropriation and codification of 'scholarship' and 'knowledge' about women in the third world by particular analytic categories employed in writings on the subject which take as their primary point of reference feminist interests as they have been articulated in the US and western Europe. My concern about such writings derives from my own implication and investment in contemporary debates in feminist theory, and the urgent political necessity of forming strategic coalitions across class, race and national boundaries. Clearly, western feminist discourse and political practice is neither singular nor homogeneous in its goals, interests or analyses. However, it is possible to trace a coherence of

Critical frames in educational research: Feminist and post‐structural perspectives

Abstract: (1992). Critical frames in educational research: Feminist and post‐structural perspectives. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 31, Qualitative Issues in Educational Research, pp. 87-99.

Hybridity: The Cultural Logic Of Globalization

Abstract: Chapter 1: Cultural Hybridity and International Communication Chapter 2: Scenarios of Global Culture Chapter 3: The Trails and Tales of Hybridity Chapter 4: Corporate Transculturalism Chapter 5, The Political Economy of Hybrid Media Texts Chapter 6, Identity on the Line: Growing up Hybrid Chapter 7: Hybridity Without Guarantees: Towards Critical Transculturalism