Where can theory go now? Where other voices concern themselves with theory's life or death, the contributors to Theory Aside take up another possibility: that our theoretical prospects are better served worrying less about "what’s next?" and more about "what else?" Instead of looking for the next big thing, the fourteen prominent thinkers in this volume take up lines of thought lost or overlooked during theory's canonization. They demonstrate that intellectual progress need not depend on the discovery of a new theorist or theory. Moving subtly through a diverse range of thinkers and topics—aesthetics, affect, animation and film studies, bibliography, cognitive science, globalization, phenomenology, poetics, political and postcolonial theory, race and identity, queer theory, and sociological reading practices—the contributors show that a more sustained, less apocalyptic attention to ideas might lead to a richer discussion of our intellectual landscapes and the place of the humanities and social sciences in it. In their turn away from the radically new, these essays reveal that what’s fallen aside still surprises.
Contributors. Ian Balfour, Karen Beckman, Pheng Cheah, Frances Ferguson, William Flesch, Anne-Lise François, Mark B. N. Hansen, Simon Jarvis, Heather Love, Natalie Melas, Jason Potts, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jordan Alexander Stein, Daniel Stout, Irene Tucker
- Contents
- Introduction - On the Side: Allocations of Attention in the Theoretical Moment | Jason Potts and Daniel Stout
- Part I. Chronologies Aside
- 1. Writing the History of Homophobia | Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
- 2. Late Exercises in Minimal Affirmatives | Anne-Lise François
- 3. Comparative Noncontemporaneities: C. L. R. James and Ernst Bloch | Natalie Melas
- 4. On Suicide, and Other Forms of Social Extinguishment | Elizabeth A. Povinelli
- Part II. Approaches Aside
- 5. What Is Historical Poetics? | Simon Jarvis
- 6. The Biopolitics of Recognition: Making Female Subjects of Globalization | Pheng Cheah
- 7. Before Racial Construction | Irene Tucker
- 8. Archive Favor: African American Literature before and after Theory | Jordan Alexander Stein
- 9. What Cinema Wasn’t: Animating Film Theory’s Double Blind Spot | Karen Beckman
- Part III. Figures Aside
- 10. Hyperbolic Discounting and Intertemporal Bargaining | William Flesch
- 11. The Primacy of Sensation: Psychophysics, Phenomenology, Whitehead | Mark B. N. Hansen
- 12. Reading the Social: Erving Goffman and Sexuality Studies | Heather Love
- 13. Our I. A. Richards Moment: The Machine and Its Adjustments | Frances Ferguson
- 14. Needing to Know (:) Theory / Afterwords | Ian Balfour
- Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
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