Jeffrey T. Nealon, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy, Penn State University's Books

The Theory Toolbox

Critical Concepts for the New Humanities

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy, Penn State University,Susan Searls Giroux

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The Theory Toolbox

Critical Concepts for the New Humanities

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy, Penn State University,Susan Searls Giroux

This text involves students in understanding and using the 'tools' of critical social and literary theory from the first day of class. It is an ideal first introduction before students encounter more difficult readings from critical and postmodern perspectives. Nealon and Giroux describe key concepts and illuminate each with an engaging inquiry that asks students to consider deeper and deeper questions. Written in students' own idiom, and drawing its examples from the social world, literature, popular culture, and advertising, The Theory Toolbox offers students the language and opportunity to theorize rather than positioning them to respond to theory as a reified history of various schools of thought. Clear and engaging, it avoids facile description, inviting students to struggle with ideas and the world by virtue of the book's relentless challenge to common assumptions and its appeal to common sense.

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227

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Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

1461645840

ISBN 13

9781461645849

Fates of the Performative

From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon

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Fates of the Performative

From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon

A powerful new examination of the performative that asks “what’s next?” for this well-worn concept From its humble origins in J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory of the 1950s, the performative has grown to permeate wildly diverse scholarly fields, ranging from deconstruction and feminism to legal theory and even theories about the structure of matter. Here Jeffrey T. Nealon discovers how the performative will remain vital in the twenty-first century, arguing that it was never merely concerned with linguistic meaning but rather constitutes an insight into the workings of immaterial force. Fates of the Performative takes a deep dive into this “performative force” to think about the continued power and relevance of this wide-ranging concept. Offering both a history of the performative’s mutations and a diagnosis of its present state, Nealon traces how it has been deployed by key writers in the past sixty years, including foundational thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and Judith Butler; contemporary theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Antonio Negri; and the “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith. Ultimately, Nealon’s inquiry is animated by one powerful question: what’s living and what’s dead in performative theory? In deconstructing the reaction against the performative in current humanist thought, Fates of the Performative opens up important conversations about systems theory, animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and the digital humanities. Nealon’s stirring appeal makes a necessary declaration of the performative’s continued power and relevance at a time of neoliberal ascendancy.

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254

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U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452965382

ISBN 13

9781452965383

Elegy for Literature

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon

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Elegy for Literature

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon

The first chapter is an overview of the current "crisis" of literary study, brought about by downsizings following the crash of 2008 (from which literary studies never really recovered), compounded by the Covid pandemic, and rocked by the bedrock questions put to the academic study of literature by the Black Lives Matter protests. This chapter also looks at why theory matters in the present - as an introduction to modes of questioning and ways of life, which the author opposes to the English department's understanding of literature as a series of disciplinary objects to be understood or appreciated. The second chapter is a specific exploration of the novel, the current reigning form of literature and literary study in both popular and academic contexts, and the novel's relation to the present (of new materialism) and the past (the European history of the novel as the official form for warehousing bourgeois subjective experience). If new materialism (including anti-racist critiques) questions the world-view of bourgeois Eurocentric humanism, it also brings into question the centrality of that world view's primary artistic form, the novel.

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ISBN 10

1839983957

ISBN 13

9781839983955

Plant Theory

Biopower and Vegetable Life

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon

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Plant Theory

Biopower and Vegetable Life

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon

In our age of ecological disaster, this book joins the growing philosophical literature on vegetable life to ask how our present debates about biopower and animal studies change if we take plants as a linchpin for thinking about biopolitics. Logically enough, the book uses animal studies as a way into the subject, but it does so in unexpected ways. Upending critical approaches of biopolitical regimes, it argues that it is plants rather than animals that are the forgotten and abjected forms of life under humanist biopower. Indeed, biopolitical theory has consistently sidestepped the issue of vegetable life, and more recently, has been outright hostile to it. Provocatively, Jeffrey T. Nealon wonders whether animal studies, which has taken the "inventor" of biopower himself to task for speciesism, has not misread Foucault, thereby managing to extend humanist biopower rather than to curb its reach. Nealon is interested in how and why this is the case. Plant Theory turns to several other thinkers of the high theory generation in an effort to imagine new futures for the ongoing biopolitical debate.

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166

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804796785

ISBN 13

9780804796781

Fates of the Performative

From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon

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Fates of the Performative

From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon

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U of Minnesota Press

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1452965382

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9781452965383

The Theory Toolbox

Critical Concepts for the New Humanities

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy, Penn State University,Susan Searls Giroux

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The Theory Toolbox

Critical Concepts for the New Humanities

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy, Penn State University,Susan Searls Giroux

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227

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Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

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1461645840

ISBN 13

9781461645849

I'm Not Like Everybody Else

Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon

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I'm Not Like Everybody Else

Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music

By: Jeffrey T. Nealon

Despite the presence of the Flaming Lips in a commercial for a copier and Iggy Pop’s music in luxury cruise advertisements, Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that popular music has not exactly been co-opted in the American capitalist present. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism has, in fact, found a central organizing use for the values of twentieth-century popular music: being authentic, being your own person, and being free. In short, not being like everybody else. Through a consideration of the shift in dominant modes of power in the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from what Michel Foucault calls a dominant “disciplinary” mode of power to a “biopolitical” mode, Nealon argues that the modes of musical “resistance” need to be completely rethought and that a commitment to musical authenticity or meaning—saying “no” to the mainstream—is no longer primarily where we might look for music to function against the grain. Rather, it is in the technological revolutions that allow biopolitical subjects to deploy music within an everyday set of practices (MP3 listening on smartphones and iPods, streaming and downloading on the internet, the background music that plays nearly everywhere) that one might find a kind of ambient or ubiquitous answer to the “attention capitalism” that has come to organize neoliberalism in the American present. In short, Nealon stages the final confrontation between “keepin’ it real” and “sellin’ out.”

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143

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

149620865X

ISBN 13

9781496208651

Book's by Jeffrey T. Nealon, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy, Penn State University

The Theory Toolbox

The Theory Toolbox

Fates of the Performative

Fates of the Performative

Elegy for Literature

Elegy for Literature

Plant Theory

Plant Theory

Fates of the Performative

Fates of the Performative

The Theory Toolbox

The Theory Toolbox

I'm Not Like Everybody Else

I'm Not Like Everybody Else

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