CRITICAL THEORY | SOCIAL ANALYSIS | POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
The year 1627 saw the publication of short and incomplete work of fiction by Francis Bacon in which he imagined a previously undreamed of scientific and technological future. The book he wrote was called The New Atlantis. Some time back I read this astonishing little novella. While it was a cracking good read, you could […]
Jennifer Denrow is the author of California (Four Way Books, 2011). Her chapbooks include How We Know it is That (Horse Less Press, 2014) and From California, On (Brave Men Press, 2012). Her writing has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, jubilat, Alaska Quarterly Review, Octopus, and Poets.Org. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Denver and is […]
In my previous post, I explored the distinction between the state of exception and Maurice Blanchot’s opening remarks from The Writing of the Disaster. I ended pondering some of Blanchot’s remarks on the disaster and forgetfulness with respect to Pan and “panic.” In this post, I want to more explicitly focus on some literary representations […]
As I ended my previous post in this series, the postsecular moment has brought with it a broadening of application of the anti-Semitism the Horkheimer and Adorno describe with respect to the literary figure of “the Jew.” It is especially important to note this transposition with respect to current U.S. politics and discussions of neoliberalism. […]
I have been working through a reading of Max Horkheimer and Thedor Adorno’s classic work of Critical Theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment. I am particularly interested in the use of literary concepts in their critique. As we have seen in earlier posts, their first few chapters moved historically, seeing the core of enlightenment in Odysseus as […]
In my previous post, I took a turn from direct analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment to engage with David Scott’s writing on tragic disposition in Conscripts of Modernity. I then focused on Emmanuel Levinas’s early essay, “Reality and Its Shadow.” I merged Levinas’s pessimism concerning art and his call for a distinctive kind of criticism with […]
I ended my first post in this series considering David Scott’s description of the tragic disposition as an obligated action in a world where values are “unstable and ambiguous.” I have been rethinking Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment with particular attention to the role a conception of the Literary plays in their work because that […]
I am often perplexed, sometimes disturbed, and generally intrigued by the use of Literature in philosophical arguments. While there is a robust tradition of Marxian-influenced material critique within Cultural Studies, the conception of “the Literary” within literary studies also went through its own kind of “secularization” during the latter half of the twentieth-century. In the […]
The New Polis is honored to present Dr. Tinker’s follow-up piece to “Redskin, Tanned Hide: A Book of Christian History Bound in the Flayed Skin of an American Indian: The Colonial Romance, christian Denial and the Cleansing of a christian School of Theology,” published in The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion, Volume 5, Issue 9 (October 2014). […]
In this post, I argue that postmodern writer, Raymond Federman’s reluctant commitment to text, his necessity to return to and interrupt narrative and to make text, emphasizing its artificial nature, exhibits a Jewish ethical commitment to resist representation. In doing so, Federman continues longstanding themes in Jewish hermeneutics as well as presenting examples of what […]