Miller: Postmodern Spiritual Practices

Postmodern Spiritual Practices

The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault

Paul Allen Miller

Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, by Paul Allen Miller, argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the reception of Plato. This fact has gone underappreciated in the Anglophone world due to a fundamental division in culture. Until very recently, the concerns of academic philosophy and philology have had little in common. On the one hand, this is due to analytic philosophy’s self-confinement to questions of epistemology, speech act theory, and philosophy of science. As such, it has had little to say about the relation between antique and contemporary modes of thought.

On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology’s own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenschaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages.

A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers’ contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism’s chief thinkers’ debts to Plato and the ancient world.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Walsh: The Rhetoric of Fictionality

The Rhetoric of Fictionality

Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction

Richard Walsh

Narrative theory has always been centrally concerned with fiction, yet it has tended to treat fictions as if they were merely the framed or disowned equivalents of nonfictional narratives. A rhetorical perspective upon fictionality, however, sees it as a direct way of meaning and a distinct kind of communicative gesture. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction by Richard Walsh argues the merit of such a perspective and demonstrates its radical implications for narrative theory.

A new conception of fictionality as a distinctive rhetorical resource, somewhat like the master-trope of fictional narrative, cuts across many of the core theoretical issues in the field. The model, set out in chapter one, is subsequently tested and elaborated in relation to currently prevalent assumptions about narrativity and mimesis; narrative structure; the narrator and transmission; voice and mediacy; narrative media and cognition; and creativity, reception, and involvement. Throughout, the theoretical analysis seeks to vindicate readers’ intuitions about fiction without merely restating them: the result is a forceful challenge to many of narrative theory’s orthodoxies.

The rhetorical model of fictionality advanced in this book offers up new areas of inquiry into the purchase of fictiveness itself upon questions of narrative interpretation. It urges a fundamental reconception of the apparatus of narrative theory by theorizing the conditions of significance that make fictions conceivable and worthwhile.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Hall: The Academic Community

The Academic Community

A Manual for Change

Donald E. Hall

In The Academic Community: A Manual for Change, Donald E. Hall builds on his earlier The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual (2002) and confronts the most pressing issues in higher education today: the coherence of undergraduate instruction, priorities in graduate training, public perceptions of colleges and universities, and collegiality and cohesion within departments and institutions. Drawing on the dialogue-based theories of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hall urges a reinvestment in community-building by academics, with chapters examining the process of community creation and enhancement in the classroom, the department and college, and the broader regions which surround university campuses.

In offering concrete strategies for revitalizing college and university classes and campuses, Hall urges readers to become agents of change within their institutions and the larger political arena. Among the topics he addresses are undergraduate training in public intellectualism, graduate training in institutional service and collegiality, and institutional commitments to public outreach and community service. The book offers real-life examples and practical tips in its far-ranging discussion of the state of higher education in the United States today.

The Academic Community: A Manual for Change is a clarion call for a renewed optimism, energy, and focus in tackling the complex problems facing the academy in the twenty-first century.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org