The Topographical Imagination of Jameson, Baudrillard, and Foucault (Emerging Humanities) - Softcover

Rizza, Michael James

9781934542514: The Topographical Imagination of Jameson, Baudrillard, and Foucault (Emerging Humanities)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934542512 ISBN 13: 9781934542514

Publisher: The Davies Group, Publishers, 2015

This in-depth discussion of several canonical theorists -- Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault -- traces the trajectory of their ideas from one text to the next. It focuses on how these theorists attempt to avoid the problem of representation, as well as humanist subjectivity, even as they imagine the external situations that shape individual identity. Although the author offers in-depth overviews, he does not simply rehearse the theories, such as many introductions to theory do. Instead, he excavates the topographical imagination that results from seeking to constitute the subject from without, from its external situation. He draws forth the organizing figure of each theorist’s spatial thinking—Jameson’s Marxist dialectical levels, Baudrillard’s double spiral of the symbolic and the semiotic, and Foucault’s dual bar of exclusion—which provides readers an innovative way to approach complex ideas

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