The Limits of Theory - Hardcover

Kavanagh, Thomas M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804717052 ISBN 13: 9780804717052

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1989

Synopsis

This collection of eight essays by some of today's most innovative and seminal thinkers argues that there is a limit beyond which the enterprise of literary theory becomes something different from what it presents itself as being. These writers ask, in different ways, how theory functions and how it might preserve within its own practices and effects the freedom of reading, the presence of the real, and the challenge of a voice speaking outside the rhetorics of mastery.

About this title

Review:

"In response to the noisy world of contemporary theory, Kavanagh has assembled a provocative collection of essays by critics and philosophers who share the conviction that there is a limit beyond which the drive to theorize transforms theory into something different from what it presents itself as being. . . . Limits attempts with considerable success to strike a delicate balance between critiquing theoretical excess and defending theory's usefulness." -- Scott Sprenger * Modern Language Notes *

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0804717052
• ISBN 13: 9780804717052
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 268
• Editor: Kavanagh Thomas