This highly original and timely volume engages scholars from the breadth of social science and the humanities to provide a critical perspective on cultural forms, practices and identities. It looks beyond the postmodern debate to reinstate the critical dimension in cultural analysis, providing a "student-friendly" introduction to key contemporary issues such as the body, AIDS, race, the environment and virtual reality.
Theorizing Culture is essential reading for undergraduate courses in cultural and media studies and sociology, and will have considerable appeal for students and scholars of critical theory, gender studies and the history of ideas.
Acknowledgements, Contributors, Theorizing culture: an introduction,
Part I: Truth, reality and cultural critique,
1. Culture, criticism and
communal values: on the ethics of enquiry,
2. Realism and its discontents: on
the crisis of cultural representation in ethnographic texts,
3. Reflexivity
in academic culture,
4. Theorizing the bodys fictions,
5. Culture,
subjectivity and the real; or, psychoanalysis reading postmodernity,
6.
Adorno, Oakeshott and the voice of poetry,
7. Representing AIDS: the textual
politics of health discourse,
8. News, truth and postmodernity: unravelling
the will to facticity, Part II: Recasting cultural politics,
9. The
celebration of difference and the cultural politics of racism,
10. Cultural
studies, the university and the question of borders,
11. Changing the culture
of cultural studies,
12. Nuclear family fall-out: postmodern family culture
and the media,
13. Remembering the future: the cultural study of memory,
14.
Imagining Nature: (re)constructions of the English countryside,
15. Tyrells
Owl: the limits of the technological imagination in an epoch of hyperbolic
discourse,
16. Technological reality: cultured technology and technologized
culture,
17. The temporal landscape of global/izing culture and the paradox
of postmodern futures, Index
Barbara Adam, Stuart Allan