SIGNS OF CHANGE  
Premodern -> Modern -> Postmodern

-- Stephen Barker, ed.

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Signs of Change examines the nature of change in history, philosophy, and culture. Precisely because the idea of change is so vast, the book's strategy is to exercise some control over it by organizing itself as a structured progression of theoretical, political, and ideological concerns whose focus is on change. Editor Stephen Barker begins with the idea of history and historicity and proceeds through an investigation of the relationship of semiotics and hermeneutics to change, to topography and topology as functions of change, to sexuality and gender as political aspects of a hypothetical theory of change, and to the seemingly culminative issue of life and death themselves as functions of change. The book concludes with a "coda" concerning alterity both as concept and as lived and literary phenomenon ranging from the avant-garde's "drunkenness" to the alterity of the characters in Chinese poetry. Not only does the book not attempt to make categorical statements about the nature of change, but it delights in an open-ended discussion of the implications and reverberations of change throughout the world of human experience.

Featuring twenty selected papers from the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, Universite de Montreal, May 1991.   Though the title refers to premodern and modern classifications, the essays are primarily postmodern in attitude.  Topics discussed include: semantics, semiotics, hermeneutics, Wittgenstein, Nietzche, Marx, Lacan, Foucault, historiography, the theory of Roland Barthes, the poetry of Celan; as well questions of sexuality, gender, and the politics of writing. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Editor's Introduction

 

I.  Semantics/Semiotics/Hermeneutics

1. The Semiotics of Laughter

Ib Johansen

2. Silence and the Rehabilitation of Beauty: Twentieth Century German Perspectives on the Poet's Task

Erdmann Waniek

3. Postmodernism and the Scene of Theatre

Elinor Fuchs

4. Theoretical Invention and the Contingency of Critique: The Example of Postmodern Semiotics

John Johnston

 

II.  Topography/Topology/Concertions of Change

5. From Wittgenstein's House to Morphosis: Deconstructing "Forms of Life"

Roger Bell

6. Nietzsche's Trees - And Where They Grow

Eva Geulen

7. A Misreading of Maps: The Politics of Cartography in Marxism and Poststructuralism

Bruno Bosteels

 

III.  History/Historicity/Historiography

8. Speaking for Nothing: Michel de Certeau on Narrative and Historical Time

Michael Beehler

9. The Revolution of a Trope: The Rise of the New Science and the Divestment of Rhetoric in the Seventeenth Century

Joseph Chancy

10. Memory, History, Discourse

Patrizia Calefato

 

IV.  The Ends of History:  Life/Death/(Dis)Closure

11. The Loss of Language within Imperial Liberalism: The United States' Political Structure as Differend

Steve Martinot

12. Spinning Ethics in Its Grave: Tradition and Rupture in the Theory of Roland Barthes

Sharon Meagher

13. Celan's Poetics of Address: How the Dead Resist Their History

James Hatley

 

V.  Sexuality/Gender/Politics

14. A Union Forever Deferred: Sexual Politics After Lacan

Barbara Claire Freeman

15. Love and Reproduction: Plagiarism, Pornography, and Don Quixote's Abortions

Sylvia Soderlind

16. Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal Hermeneutics

Hwa Yol Jung

 

VI.  Alterity as a Strategy of Change

17. The Intoxication of the Avant-Garde in Benjamin and Habermas

Soraya Tlatli

18. Foucault, Conventions, and New Historicism

David F. Bell

19. Irreconcilable Similarites: The Idea of Nonrepresentation

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

20. The Impossible Limit

Cynthia Pon

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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