Walter Benn Michaels

Walter Benn Michaels ( born 1948 ) is an American literary theorist.

It is through the books Our America: become known in 1967 to the End of History (2004): nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995 ) and The Shape of the Signifier. From Michael's work questions and arguments to a number have emerged of topics that are relevant to the study of literature is of central importance: issues of culture and race, personal and national identity, the difference between memory and history, disagreement and difference, as meaning and intent in interpretations.

Life

Michaels has earned his Bachelor of Arts and received his doctorate there in 1975 at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1970. Then he taught 1974-1977 and again 1987-2001 at Johns Hopkins University and 1977-1987 and the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2001 he teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He is best known for his study of American Naturalism The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; American Literature at the Turn of the Century, which was published in 1987.

Michaels is also appreciated for his teaching. His authored with Steven Knapp article " Against Theory" was included in the Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism.

He is currently at the University of Illinois professor in the Department of English, which he headed from 2001 to 2007 as director.

Work

In Our Americas Michaels claims that the American nativist modernism of the 1920s, a period of " research and development" of identity was thought that should characterize the American world of ideas in the twentieth century. Connected with this thesis is Michael's assertion that the nativist modernism has established the strategy to answer the question of the culture that one should accept themselves by first determining the own race. He explains, " the idea of ​​cultural identity is - despite the fact that it was usually as an alternative to a racial identity shown in recent years - in fact, not only historical, but also logical ways an extension of racial identity " in the center of the book is that Michaels denies that the concept of cultural identity, and the identity is ever become a description of the practices and values ​​of a group, but rather the object of a essentialist endeavor to be what one already is.

In the following decade, Michaels' critique of identity continued, especially in his next book, The shape of the signifier. The action in this already as the previous work is to reveal the common logic of positions that are considered as opposed to political. What signifies it, the book asks that a liberal thinkers such as Arthur M. Schlesinger and a multiculturalist author Toni Morrison both have an interest in history - so -to-learn something - rewrite as a sort of reminder - that is something to be experienced? What does it mean about it out for Paul de Man and other Poststruktualisten to focus on the " materiality of the signifier " - so it may look like words or feel, at the expense of their importance - seem an interest that they share with contemporary writers such as Kathy Acker and Bret Easton Ellis and contemporary science fiction authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson? Michael's book suggests, common to these strategies is the development towards a primacy of subject position, a pre-eminence, from which the question who someone is - so one's own identity - appears important than the question of what anyone thinks.

The War on Terror has only perfected this development, as he, like Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington seemed to say, any question of ideological disagreement on capitalism and social organization made ​​it seem as unimportant. Because in the War on Terror to be one with the words of President George W. Bush either for America or against it, and thus on the side of " bad guys ".

The movement of Michael's logic proceeds by reading homologies and simultaneities where otherwise significant differences are seen. Just as some other well-known political theorist (about Nancy Fraser ), agrees Michaels, that talk of identity have replaced a dispute over economic inequality - there is now a policy of recognition, but not a policy of redistribution. This argument specifies Michaels is in his 2006 book The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, where he stressed that America is too busy with issues of race, at the expense of issues on which class to play a role.

Works (selection, English)

Essays

  • Against Theory. Critical Inquiry 8.4 ( Summer 1982): 723-42.
  • The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Christopher Nolan 's Idea of Form. ebr: the electronic book review ( 1 October 2007).
  • Going Boom ( February / March 2009).
  • The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Metropolitan, New York, 2006.
  • The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004.
  • Our America: nativism, Modernism and Pluralism. Duke University Press, Durham 1995.
  • The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987.
Psychological nativism Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
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