Elegy for Theory - Softcover

D. N. Rodowick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674088158 ISBN 13: 9780674088153

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In "Elegy for Theory," D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970s and 1980s, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities. Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent--one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art. At a moment when university curriculums are everywhere being driven by scientism and market forces, "Elegy for Theory" advances a rigorous argument for the importance of the arts and humanities as transformative, self-renewing cultural legacies.

About this title

Review

Rodowick s project is not merely to make yet another intervention in the often rhetorically-charged debates in favor of or against theory that have occupied, divided, and haunted scholars across the humanities in the last decades. Instead, he opens the space for a historical, intellectual, and philosophical journey in quest of the senses of theory that is simultaneously an ethical and political commitment to a specific vision of what the humanities are and should continue to be in the twenty-first century. --Paola Marrati, Johns Hopkins University"

About the Author

D. N. Rodowick is Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0674088158
• ISBN 13: 9780674088153
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304