Series: The Wellek Library Lectures

Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art—especially architecture, music, and painting—is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from...

Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have...

Peter Sloterdijk is among the most acclaimed and widely read philosophers of the past half-century. Called "Germany's most controversial thinker" by the New Yorker, he has challenged and provoked readers worldwide with extraordinarily ambitious and wide-ranging works of philosophical and cultural critique. In The Terrible Children of Modernity, Sloterdijk offers a magisterial and profound investigation into the vicissitudes of historical...

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is among the foremost figures in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences of the past half-century. In this book, originally published in 2003, she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and sounds an urgent call for a new comparative literature, in which the discipline is reborn—one that is not appropriated...

Since Gutenberg's time, every aspect of print has gradually changed. But the advent of computational media has exponentially increased the pace, transforming how books are composed, designed, edited, typeset, distributed, sold, and read. N. Katherine Hayles traces the emergence of what she identifies as the postprint condition, exploring how the interweaving of print and digital technologies has changed not only...

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of "the strange science of writing." In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for "great" writing: The School of the Dead – the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing...

Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism's multipronged assault on democratic values. From its...

The celebrated author of Gender Trouble here redefines Antigone's legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. Butler's new interpretation does nothing less than reconceptualise the incest taboo in relation to kinship—and open up the concept of kinship to cultural change. Antigone, the renowned insurgent from Sophocles's Oedipus, has long been a feminist...

In an effort to deny the ongoing effect of colonialism and imperialism on contemporary political life, the death knell for a multicultural society has been sounded from all sides. That's the provocative argument Paul Gilroy makes in this unorthodox defense of the multiculture. Gilroy's searing analyses of race, politics, and culture have always remained attentive to the material conditions of...