Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database

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Overview

In the essays collected in Local Transcendence, Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism - including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory - and digital information technology.
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Editorial Reviews

N. Katherine Hayles

“Following the magnificent achievement of The Laws of Cool, Alan Liu in Local Transcendence takes on the problem he astutely identified as deeply connected with the ‘cool’: the loss of historical grounding and consequent restructuring of identities by postindustrial corporations. Offering a rigorous yet humane critique of New Historicism and cultural criticism from the inside, he interrogates the possibilities for historical grounding in the age of information in a witty prose style and a capacious field of reference. Local Transcendence is required reading for anyone interested in the multiple conjunctions, oppositions, and synergies between information, historicism, and cultural context.”
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780226486956
  • Publisher: University of Chicago Press
  • Publication date: 11/1/2008
  • Pages: 408
  • Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Alan Liu is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author, most recently, of The Laws of Cool, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Table of Contents

Introduction Contingent Methods 1

1 The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism 29

2 Trying Cultural Criticism: Wordsworth and Subversion 71

3 Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail 109

4 Remembering the Spruce Goose: Historicism, Postmodernism, Romanticism 139

5 The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning 157

6 The Interdisciplinary War Machine 167

7 Sidney's Technology: A Critique by Technology of Literary History 187

8 Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse 209

9 Escaping History:The New Historicism, Databases, and Contingency 239

Notes 263

Works Cited 333

Index 361

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