Local Transcendence
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A01=Alan Liu
aesthetics
art
Author_Alan Liu
Category=DSBH
commemoration
detail
discourse
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
formalism
future
history
innovation
interdisciplinary
literature
media
memorial
memory
modernity
mourning
new historicism
nonfiction
past
popular culture
postmodern
remembrance
romanticism
sidney
spruce goose
subversion
technology
transcendence
wordsworth
Product details
- ISBN 9780226486963
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 17 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2008
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today's society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present - the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen. Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history.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. What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, Liu asks, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicism?
"Local Transcendence" includes one previously unpublished essay and a synthetic introduction in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.
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.
