Critical theory

About: Critical theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5372 publications have been published within this topic receiving 164765 citations.

Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory

Abstract: Acknowledgements. Introduction. Part I: Powers, Norms, and Vocabularies of Contestation:. 1. Foucault on Modern Power:. Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions. 2. Michael Foucault: A a Young Conservativea ?. 3. Foucaulta s Body Language: A Posthumanist Political Rhetoric?. Part II: On the Political and the Symbolic:. 4. The French Derrideans:. Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?. 5. Solidarity or Singularity?:. Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy. Part III: Gender and the Politics of Need Interpretation:. 6. Whata s Critical about Critical Theory?. The Case of Habermas and Gender. 7. Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation. 8. Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist--Feminist Critical. Theory of Late Capitalist Political Culture. Index.

One-Dimensional Man: A Systematic Critique of Human Domination and Nature-Society Relations

Abstract: Herbert Marcuse’s critical theories outline some of the most sophisticated and powerful analyses of modern capitalism’s environmental problems. Although Marcuse’s intricately crafted critiques ofte...

The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work

Abstract: Louise M. Rosenblatt s award-winning work continues increasingly to be read in a wide range of academic fieldsliterary criticism, reading theory, aesthetics, composition, rhetoric, speech communication, and education. Her view of the reading transaction as a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances rules out the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities. The transactional concept accounts for the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context. Essential reading for the specialist, this book is also well suited for courses in criticism, critical theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics.Starting from the same nonfoundationalist premises, Rosenblatt avoids the extreme relativism of postmodern theories derived mainly from Continental sources. A deep understanding of the pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Peirce and of key issues in the social sciences is the basis for a view of language and the reading process that recognizes the potentialities for alternative interpretations and at the same time provides a rationale for the responsible reading of texts.The book has been praised for its lucid explanation of the multidimensional character of the reading processevoking, interpreting, and evaluating the work. The nonliterary (efferent) and the literary (aesthetic) are shown not to be opposites but to represent a continuum of reading behaviors. The author amply illustrates her theoretical points with interpretations of varied texts. The epilogue carries further her critique of rival contemporary theories."

Research as Praxis

Abstract: The author, who is concerned with the methodological implications of critical theory, explores issues in the developing area of emancipatory research. She defines the concept of "research as praxis...

Dialectic of enlightenment : philosophical fragments

Abstract: Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.