The purpose of art, according to the artist Banksy, is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. The purpose of that creative practice called “theory” is to disturb everyone—to perpetually unsettle all our staid assumptions, all our fixed understandings, all our familiar identities. An alternative to the typically large and unwieldy theory anthology, Adventures in Theory offers a manageably short collection of writings that have famously enacted the central purpose of theory.
Adventures in Theory takes readers on a steadily unsettling tour, spanning the most significant thought provocations in the history of theoretical writing from Marx and Nietzsche through Foucault and Derrida to Butler, Zizek, and Edelman. Engagingly lean and enjoyably mean, this is a minimalist anthology with maximal impact.
Edited by:
Professor Calvin Thomas
Imprint: Bloomsbury
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 216mm,
Width: 140mm,
Weight: 412g
ISBN: 9781501336324
ISBN 10: 1501336320
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 29 November 2018
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Credits Editor's Introduction: Gearing Up for Adventures 1. Karl Marx: Three Excerpts from Early Writings (1844) 2. Friedrich Nietzsche: On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873) 3. Ferdinand de Saussure: The Sign Considered in Its Totality (1916) 4. Victor Shklovsky: Art as Technique (1917) 5. Frantz Fanon: The Fact of Blackness (1952) 6. Roland Barthes: Myth Today (1957) 7. Michel Foucault: Nietzsche, Freud, Marx (1967) 8. Barbara Johnson: A Critique of Western Metaphysics (1983) 9. Jacques Derrida: Différance (1967) 10: Editor's Interlude: Two Brief Pieces on Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory 11. Louis Althusser: On Ideology (1971) 12. Gayle Rubin: The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex (1975) 13. Peter Brooks: Freud's Masterplot (1977) 14. Edward Said: From the Introduction to Orientalism (1978) 15. Ihab Hassan: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism (1987) 16. Gayatri Spivak: Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988) 17. Judith Butler: Imitation and Gender Insubordination (1991) 18. Slavoj Zizek: The Real of Sexual Difference (2002) 19. Lee Edelman: The Future Is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification and the Death Drive (1998) Editor's Afterword: (Still) No Kingdom of the Queer Index
Calvin Thomas is Professor of English at Georgia State University, USA. He is the author of Ten Lessons in Theory (Bloomsbury, 2013), Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory (2008), and Male Matters (1996). He is the editor of Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (2000).
Reviews for Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology
Noticing that Theory has been diluted, mixed up in concoctions of old sours and rinds, Calvin Thomas has decided to refresh it, turning it into an adventure of insight that is also a restorative delight with strong but balanced recipes for a 21st-century intellectual Bloody Mary. * Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, and Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, USA *
