Preface Introduction: The Role of the Reader I. Open 1. The Poetics of the Open Work 2. The Semantics of Metaphor 3. On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language II. Closed 4. The Myth of Superman 5. Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris 6. Narrative Structures in Fleming III. Open/Closed 7. Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs 8. Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Bibliography

Feminismo, historia y postmodernidad:

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

General editor's preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Representing the postmodern: What is postmodernism? Representation and its politics, Whose postmodernism? Postmodernity, postmodernism, and modernism. 2. Postmodernist representation: De-naturalizing the natural, Photographic discourse, Telling Stories: fiction and history. 3. Re-presenting the past: 'Total history' de-totalized, Knowing the past in the present, The archive as text. 4. The politics of parody: Parodic postmodern representation, Double-coded politics, Postmodern film? 5. Text/image border tensions: The paradoxes of photography, The ideological arena of photo-graphy, The politics of address 6. Postmodernism and feminisms: Politicizing desire, Feminist postmodernist parody, The private and the public. Concluding note: some directed reading. Bibliography. Index.

The Politics of Postmodernism

The Use and Abuse of History

Marxists do not study the past in order to reconstruct what happened in it, in the sense of determining what events occurred at specific times and places. They study history in order to derive the laws of historical dynamics. It is these laws which preside over the systemic changes in social formations, and it is knowledge of these laws (rather than those of structure) which permits Marxists to predict changes likely to occur in any given current social system. Knowledge of these laws of process makes it possible for us to distinguish between "realistic" and "delusory" programs for effecting social change. Only insofar as we have succeeded in accurately mapping what history has been down to the present are we permitted to know what is possible and what impossible, in the way of any social program in the present designed for the future. Marxism was never intended to be merely a reactive social philosophy, but it can be innovative and constitutive of a new life for humankind only in the extent to which it has actually divined the laws of history and used them to uncover the "plot" of the whole human drama which renders its surface phenomena not only retrospectively understandable but prospectively meaningful as well. Many modern Marxists, embarrassed by the similarities between this notion of history and its religious, specifically Judaeo-Christian prototypes, have tended to play down this "prophetic" aspect and given themselves to the study of discrete, "concrete" historical and social phenomena. This allows them to appear more "scientific," after the manner of their counterparts in the bourgeois social sciences, but it also deprives their discourse of that moral coloration which Marx derived from his Hegelian, utopian, and religious forebears. Insofar as Marxist thought achieves the kind of respectability which comes with the aping of methods or techniques of contemporary social science, just to that extent Marxism loses in its power to inspire a visionary politics. Take the vision out of Marxism and all you will have left is a timid historicism of the kind favored by liberals and the kind of accommodationist politics which utilitarians identify as the essence of politics itself. The visionary side of Marxism has been left to the cultivation of literary artists and students of their work in the 20th century. This conforms to the conditions of a larger split within the human sciences in general between practitioners who wish to contrive a knowledge that will be therapeutic, accommodationist, or adaptive in its effects and those who envision one that will be transformative, reconstitutive, radically revisionary in its aims. One can observe the crystallization of this split condition in the debates that occurred within Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s, in the thought of Luk~cs, Brecht, Benjamin, the members of the Frankfurt school, and so on. The more Marxism attained to (or claimed) the authority of a science, the more the stewardship of its "visionary" side fell to the literary artist and critic. The more it succeeded in becoming

Feminismo, historia y postmodernidad:

Citations

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

References

The Politics of Postmodernism

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

The Use and Abuse of History

Getting out of History