The ethics of theory : philosophy, history, literature / Robert Doran.

Author
Doran, Robert, 1968- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PIc, 2017.
Description
x, 229 pages ; 25 cm

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Firestone Library - Stacks B809.3 .D67 2017 Browse related items Request

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    Subject(s)
    Summary note
    Robert Doran offers the first broad assessment of the ethical challenges of Critical Theory across the humanities and social sciences, calling into question the sharp dichotomy typically drawn between the theoretical and the ethical, the analytical and the prescriptive. In a series of discrete but interrelated interventions, Doran exposes the ethical underpinnings of theoretical discourses that are often perceived as either oblivious to or highly skeptical of any attempt to define ethics or politics. Doran thus discusses a variety of themes related to the problematic status of ethics or the ethico-political in Theory: the persistence of existentialist ethics in structuralist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial writing; the ethical imperative of the return of the subject (self-creation versus social conformism); the intimate relation between the ethico-political and the aesthetic (including the role of literary history in Erich Auerbach and Edward Said); the political implications of a "philosophy of the present" for Continental thought (including Heidegger's Nazism); the ethical dimension of the debate between history and theory (including Hayden White's idea of the "practical past" and the question of Holocaust representation); the "ethical turn" in Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty; the post-1987 "political turn" in literary and cultural studies (especially as influenced by Said).
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    Contents
    • Philosophy
    • Ethics beyond existentialism and structuralism: Sartre's critique of dialectical reason and the debate with Lévi-Strauss
    • Foucault's "ethics of the self"
    • Derrida in Heidelberg: the specter of Heidegger's Nazism and the question of ethics
    • Richard Rorty's "cultural politics": ironist philosophy and the ethics of reading
    • History
    • From metahistory to the practical past: Hayden White's existentialist philosophy of history
    • Hayden White and the ethics of historiography literature
    • The ethics of conversion: metaphysical desire in Ren, Girard, and Jean-Paul Sartre
    • The ethics of realism: literary history and the sublime in Erich Auerbach's mimesis
    • The ethics of philology: Erich Auerbach and the fate of humanism
    • Edward Said, orientalism, and the political turn in literary and cultural studies.
    ISBN
    • 9781474225922 ((hardback))
    • 1474225926 ((hardback))
    • 9781474225939 ((pbk.))
    • 1474225934 ((pbk.))
    LCCN
    2016016468
    OCLC
    946481492
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