Georg Lukacs

James Joyce has emerged as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century, and his writings continue to invite enormous amounts of scholarly attention. This volume offers a careful reading of Joyce within the context of recent developments in postcolonial theory. Booker shows that Joyce's work provides critiques of capitalism and colonialism that have much in common with the works of more recent African and Caribbean writers. However, Joyce remains a fundamentally European writer whose work differs substantially from that of most postcolonial writers from Africa and the Caribbean. In pursuing these readings, Booker also pays careful attention to the cultural politics of Joyce criticism, arguing that ideological considerations arising primarily from the Cold War have, until now, strongly distorted readings of Joyce from all political perspectives.

In The Wager of Lucien Goldmann, Mitchell Cohen provides the first full-length study of this major figure of postwar French intellectual life and champion of socialist humanism. While many Parisian leftists staunchly upheld Marxism's scientificity in the 1950s and 1960s, Lucien Goldmann insisted that Marxism was by then in severe crisis and had to reinvent itself radically if it were to survive. He rejected the traditional Marxist view of the proletariat and contested the structuralist and antihumanist theorizing that infected French left-wing circles in the tumultuous 1960s. Highly regarded by thinkers as diverse as Jean Piaget and Alasdair MacIntyre, Goldmann is shown here as a socialist who, unlike many others of his time, refused to portray his aspirations for humanity's future as an inexorable unfolding of history's laws. He saw these aspirations instead as a wager akin to Pascal's in the existence of God. Risk, Goldmann wrote in his classic study of Pascal and Racine, The Hidden God, possibility of failure, hope of success, and the synthesis of the three in a faith which is a wager are the essential constituent elements of the human condition. In The Wager of Lucien Goldmann, Cohen retrieves Goldmann's achievement--his genetic structuralist method, his sociology of literature, his libertarian socialist politics.

Kierkegaard and Philosophy makes many of the most important papers on Kierkegaard available in one place for the first time. These seventeen essays, written over a period of over twenty years, have all been substantially revised or specially prepared for this collection, with a new introduction by the author.In the first part, Alastair Hannay concentrates on Kierkegaard's central philosophical writings, offering closely text-based accounts of the silent concepts Kierkegaard uses. The second part shows the relevance of other thinkers' treatments of shared themes, pointing out where they differ from Kierkegaard. The concluding chapter provides a reason Kierkegaard himself would give for disagreeing with those who claim his texts are infinitely interpretable.Written by the world's foremost Kierkegaard scholar and translator, Kierkegaard and Philosophy is an indispensible resource for all students of Kierkegaard's work.

This book provides the first detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of current critical and socio-cultural debates. Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production. Gramsci's achievement is discussed particularly in relation to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas), to Brecht's theoretical writings and to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition especially Merleau-Ponty. She argues for Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time of retreat from Marxist positions on the postmodern left. Antonio Gramsci is distinguished by its range of philosophical grasp, its depth of specialized historical scholarship, and its keen sense of Gramsci's position as a crucial figure in the politics of contemporary cultural theory.

This short book contrasts the philosophies of technology of Heidegger and Marcus, and relates their work to contemporary technology studies. Feenberg sets out the historical and theoretical background of the debate, then discusses each philosopher's theory in turn.