This Is Enlightenment - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226761487 ISBN 13: 9780226761480

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Synopsis

Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, “What is Enlightenment?” The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here—not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between.

With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant’s query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volumewith the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.

About this title

About the Author

Clifford Siskin is the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English and American Literature at New York University. William Warner is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226761487
• ISBN 13: 9780226761480
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 518
• Editor: Siskin Clifford, Warner William