William V. Spanos's Books

Herman Melville and the American Calling

The Fiction after Moby-Dick, 1851-1857

By: William V. Spanos

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Herman Melville and the American Calling

The Fiction after Moby-Dick, 1851-1857

By: William V. Spanos

Argues that Herman Melville’s later work anticipates the resurgence of an American exceptionalist ethos underpinning the U.S.-led global “war on terror.”

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Page Count

298

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SUNY Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791475646

ISBN 13

9780791475645

Heidegger and Criticism

Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction

By: William V. Spanos

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Heidegger and Criticism

Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction

By: William V. Spanos

In "Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction", William Spanos examines the controversy, both in Europe and the United States, surrounding Heidegger and recent disclosures about his Nazi past. Not intended as a defense or apology for Heidegger's thought, Spanos instead affirms the importance of Heidegger's "antihumanist" interrogation of the modern age, its globalization of technology, and its neo-imperialist politics. The attack on Heidegger's "antihumanistic" discourse (by "liberal humanists" who have imported the European debate into the United States) aligns ideologically with the ongoing policing operations of William Bennett, Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza, and others in the spheres of higher education and cultural production. Throughout his arguments, Spanos focuses not so much on Heidegger the historical subject, as on the transformative cultural and political discourses and practices, implicit in and enabled by Heidegger's interrogations of Being and Time, that have led to the contemporary emergence of the multiplicity of resistant "Others" colonized by hegemonic discursive formations. All the while he reminds us that Heidegger's philosophic interrogations eventually generate a diverse body of transgressive writing and an oppositional intellectual climate in the West. Spanos is author of "Repetitions: the Postmodern Occasion in Literature and Culture" (1987) and "The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism" (Minnesota, 1992), and the editor of "Martin Heidegger and the Question in Literature" (1980) and the co-editor of "The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism" (1982). This book is intended for those in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, political theory.

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376

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816620970

ISBN 13

9780816620975

In the Neighborhood of Zero

A World War II Memoir

By: William V. Spanos

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In the Neighborhood of Zero

A World War II Memoir

By: William V. Spanos

For Spanos, this was never a "war story." It was the singular, irreducible, unnameable, dreadful experience of war. In the face of the American myth of the greatest generation, this renowned literary scholar looks back at that time and crafts a dissident, dissonant remembrance of the "just war." Retrieving the singularity of the experience of war from the grip of official American cultural memory, Spanos recaptures something of the boy's life that he lost. His book is an attempt to rescue some semblance of his awakened being-and that of the multitude of young men who fought-from the oblivion to which they have been relegated under the banalizing memorialization of the "sacrifices of our greatest generation.

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219

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803229976

ISBN 13

9780803229976

On the Ethical Imperatives of the Interregnum

Essays in Loving Strife from Soren Kierkegaard to Cornel West

By: William V. Spanos

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On the Ethical Imperatives of the Interregnum

Essays in Loving Strife from Soren Kierkegaard to Cornel West

By: William V. Spanos

This book is an autobiographical meditation on the way in which the world’s population has been transformed into a society of refugees and émigrés seeking –indeed, demanding– an alternative way of political belonging. Focusing on the interregnum we have precariously occupied since the end of World War II—and especially after 9/11— it constitutes a series of genealogical chapters that trace the author’s journey from his experience as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany to the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In doing so, it explores his search for an intellectual vocation adequate to the dislocating epiphany he experienced in bearing witness to these traumatising events. Having subsequently lost faith in the logic of belonging perpetuated by the nation-state, Spanos charts how he began to look in the rubble of that zero zone for an alternative way of belonging: one in which the old binary —whose imperative was based on the violence of the Friend/enemy opposition— was replaced by a paradoxical loving strife that enriched rather than negated the potential of each side. The chapters in this book trace this errant vocational itinerary, from the author’s early undergraduate engagement with Kierkegaard and Heidegger to Cornel West, moving from that disclosive occasion in the zero zone to this present moment.

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Page Count

153

Publisher

Springer

Published Date

ISBN 10

3319478710

ISBN 13

9783319478715

The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception

Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor

By: William V. Spanos

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The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception

Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor

By: William V. Spanos

Critics predominantly view Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor as a “testament of acceptance,” the work of a man who had become politically conservative in his last years. William V. Spanos disagrees, arguing that the novella was not only a politically radical critique of American exceptionalism but also an eerie preview of the state of exception employed, most recently, by the George W. Bush administration in the post–9/11 War on Terror. While Billy Budd, Sailor is ostensibly about the Napoleonic Wars, Spanos contends that it is at heart a cautionary tale addressed to the American public as the country prepared to extend its westward expansion into the Pacific Ocean by way of establishing a global imperial navy. Through a close, symptomatic reading of Melville’s text, Spanos rescues from critical oblivion the pervasive, dense, and decisive details that disclose the consequences of normalizing the state of exception—namely, the transformation of the criminal into the policeman (Claggart) and of the political human being into the disposable reserve that can be killed with impunity (Billy Budd). What this shows, Spanos demonstrates, is that Melville's uncanny attunement to the dark side of the American exceptionalism myth enabled him to foresee its threat to the very core of democracy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This view, Spanos believes, anticipates the state of exception theory that has emerged in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, and Jacques Ranciere, among other critical theorists. The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception illustrates that Melville, in his own time, was aware of the negative consequences of the deeply inscribed exceptionalist American identity and recognized the essential domestic and foreign policy issues that inform the country’s national security program today.

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230

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801899346

ISBN 13

9780801899348

America's Shadow

An Anatomy of Empire

By: William V. Spanos

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America's Shadow

An Anatomy of Empire

By: William V. Spanos

A study of imperialism that stretches from ancient Rome to the post-Cold War World, this provocative work boldly revises our assumptions about the genealogy of the West. Rather than locating its source in classical Greece, William V. Spanos argues, we should look to ancient Rome, which first articulated the ideas that would become fundamental to the West's imperial project. These founding ideas, he claims, have informed the American national identity and its foreign policy from its origins. The Vietnam War is at the center of this book. In the contradiction between the "free world" logic employed to justify U.S. intervention in Vietnam and the genocidal practices used to realize that logic, Spanos finds the culmination of an imperialistic discourse reaching back to the colonizing rationale of the Roman Empire. Spanos identifies the language of expansion in the "white" metaphors in Western philosophical discourse since the colonization of Greek thought by the Romans. He shows how these metaphors, and their role in metaphysical discourse, have long been complicit in the violence of imperialism.

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Page Count

318

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816633371

ISBN 13

9780816633371

Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum

An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation

By: William V. Spanos

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Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum

An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation

By: William V. Spanos

Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum interrogates the polyvalent role that American exceptionalism continues to play after 9/11. Whereas American exceptionalism is often construed as a discredited Cold War–era belief structure, Spanos persuasively demonstrates how it operationalizes an apparatus of biopolitical capture that saturates the American body politic down to its capillaries. The exceptionalism that Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum renders starkly visible is not a corrigible ideological screen. It is a deeply structured ethos that functions simultaneously on ontological, moral, economic, racial, gendered, and political registers as the American Calling. Precisely by refusing to answer the American Calling, by rendering inoperative (in Agamben’s sense) its covenantal summons, Spanos enables us to imagine an alternative America. At once timely and personal, Spanos’s meditation acknowledges the priority of being. He emphasizes the dignity not simply of humanity but of all phenomena on the continuum of being, “the groundless ground of any political formation that would claim the name of democracy.”

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285

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823268179

ISBN 13

9780823268177

The Legacy of Edward W. Said

By: William V. Spanos

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The Legacy of Edward W. Said

By: William V. Spanos

With the untimely death of Edward W. Said in 2003, various academic and public intellectuals worldwide have begun to reassess the writings of this powerful oppositional intellectual. Figures on the neoconservative right have already begun to discredit Said’s work as that of a subversive intent on slandering America’s benign global image and undermining its global authority. On the left, a significant number of oppositional intellectuals are eager to counter this neoconservative vilification, proffering a Said who, in marked opposition to the “anti-humanism” of the great poststructuralist thinkers who were his contemporaries--Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault--reaffirms humanism and thus rejects poststructuralist theory. In this provocative assessment of Edward Said’s lifework, William V. Spanos argues that Said’s lifelong anti-imperialist project is actually a fulfillment of the revolutionary possibilities of poststructuralist theory. Spanos examines Said, his legacy, and the various texts he wrote--including Orientalism,Culture and Imperialism, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism--that are now being considered for their lasting political impact.

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291

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0252092457

ISBN 13

9780252092459

Toward a Non-humanist Humanism

Theory after 9/11

By: William V. Spanos

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Toward a Non-humanist Humanism

Theory after 9/11

By: William V. Spanos

In his book The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, William V. Spanos critiqued the traditional Western concept of humanism, arguing that its origins are to be found not in ancient Greece's love of truth and wisdom, but in the Roman imperial era, when those Greek values were adapted in the service of imperialism on a deeply rooted, metaphysical level. Returning to that question of humanism in the context of the United States' war on terror in the post-9/11 era, Toward a Non-humanist Humanism points out the dehumanizing dynamics of Western modernity in which the rule of law is increasingly made flexible to defend against threats both real and potential. Spanos considers and assesses the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek as humanistic reformers and concludes with an effort to imagine a different kind of humanism—a non-humanist humanism—in which the old binary of friend versus foe gives way to a coming community without ethnic, cultural, or sexual divisions.

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204

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

143846598X

ISBN 13

9781438465982

Shock and Awe

American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

By: William V. Spanos

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Shock and Awe

American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

By: William V. Spanos

Inspired by the foreign policy entanglements of recent years, William V. Spanos offers a dramatic interpretation of TwainÕs classic A Connecticut Yankee in King ArthurÕs Court, providing a fresh assessment of the place of a global America in the American imaginary. Spanos insists that Twain identifies with his protagonist, particularly in his defining use of the spectacle, and thus with an American exceptionalism that uncannily anticipates the George W. Bush administrationÕs normalization of the state of exception and the imperial policy of Òpreemptive war,Ó unilateral Òregime change,Ó and Òshock and aweÓ tactics. Equally stimulating is SpanosÕs thoroughly original ontology of American exceptionalism and imperialism and his tracing of these forces in Twain studies and criticism over the past century.

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242

Publisher

Dartmouth College Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1611684633

ISBN 13

9781611684636

American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization

The Specter of Vietnam

By: William V. Spanos

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American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization

The Specter of Vietnam

By: William V. Spanos

In American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, William V. Spanos explores three writers—Graham Greene, Philip Caputo, and Tim O'Brien—whose work devastatingly critiques the U.S. intervention in Vietnam and exposes the brutality of the Vietnam War. Utilizing poststructuralist theory, particularly that of Heidegger, Althusser, Foucault, and Said, Spanos argues that the Vietnam War disclosed the dark underside of the American exceptionalist ethos and, in so doing, speaks directly to America's war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11. To support this argument, Spanos undertakes close readings of Greene's The Quiet American, Caputo's A Rumor of War, and O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, all of which bear witness to the self-destruction of American exceptionalism. Spanos retrieves the spectral witness that has been suppressed since the war, but that now, in the wake of the quagmire in Iraq, has returned to haunt America's post-9/11 "project for the new American century.

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344

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791479137

ISBN 13

9780791479131

The Errant Art of Moby-Dick

The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies

By: William V. Spanos

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The Errant Art of Moby-Dick

The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies

By: William V. Spanos

In The Errant Art of Moby-Dick, one of America's most distinguished critics reexamines Melville's monumental novel and turns the occasion into a meditation on the history and implications of canon formation. In Moby-Dick--a work virtually ignored and discredited at the time of its publication--William V. Spanos uncovers a text remarkably suited as a foundation for a "New Americanist" critique of the ideology based on Puritan origins that was codified in the canon established by "Old Americanist" critics from F. O. Matthiessen to Lionel Trilling. But Spanos also shows, with the novel still as his focus, the limitations of this "New Americanist" discourse and its failure to escape the totalizing imperial perspective it finds in its predecessor. Combining Heideggerian ontology with a sociopolitical perspective derived primarily from Foucault, the reading of Moby-Dick that forms the center of this book demonstrates that the traditional identification of Melville's novel as a "romance" renders it complicitous in the discourse of the Cold War. At the same time, Spanos shows how New Americanist criticism overlooks the degree to which Moby-Dick anticipates not only America's self-representation as the savior of the world against communism, but also the emergent postmodern and anti-imperial discourse deployed against such an image. Spanos's critique reveals the extraordinary relevance of Melville's novel as a post-Cold War text, foreshadowing not only the self-destructive end of the historical formation of the American cultural identity in the genocidal assault on Vietnam, but also the reactionary labeling of the current era as "the end of history." This provocative and challenging study presents not only a new view of the development of literary history in the United States, but a devastating critique of the genealogy of ideology in the American cultural establishment.

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396

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822315998

ISBN 13

9780822315995

In the Neighborhood of Zero

A World War II Memoir

By: William V. Spanos

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In the Neighborhood of Zero

A World War II Memoir

By: William V. Spanos

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Page Count

219

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803229976

ISBN 13

9780803229976

A William V. Spanos Reader

Humanist Criticism and the Secular Imperative

By: Daniel T. O'Hara,Michelle Martin,Donald Pease

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A William V. Spanos Reader

Humanist Criticism and the Secular Imperative

By: Daniel T. O'Hara,Michelle Martin,Donald Pease

The American critic William V. Spanos, a pioneer of postmodern theory and co-founder of one of its principal organs, the journal boundary 2, is, in the words of A William V. Spanos Reader coeditor Daniel T. O’Hara, everything that current post-modern theory is accused of not being: polemical, engaged, prophetic, passionate. Informed by his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Spanos saw dire con-sequences for life in modernist aesthetic experiments, and he thereafter imbued his work with a constructive aspect ever in the name of more life.

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1181

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810130939

ISBN 13

9780810130937

The Legacy of Edward W. Said

By: William V. Spanos

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The Legacy of Edward W. Said

By: William V. Spanos

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291

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0252092457

ISBN 13

9780252092459

American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization

The Specter of Vietnam

By: William V. Spanos

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American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization

The Specter of Vietnam

By: William V. Spanos

Connects the American exceptionalist ethos to the violence in Vietnam and the Middle East.

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342

Publisher

SUNY Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791472892

ISBN 13

9780791472897

America's Shadow

An Anatomy of Empire

By: William V. Spanos

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America's Shadow

An Anatomy of Empire

By: William V. Spanos

This study of imperialism stretches from ancient Rome to the post-Cold War world has the Vietnam War at its centre. It examines the language of expansion in Western philosophical discourse and its role in the violence of imperialism.

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Page Count

287

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816633371

ISBN 13

9780816633371

Herman Melville and the American Calling

The Fiction after Moby-Dick, 1851-1857

By: William V. Spanos

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Herman Melville and the American Calling

The Fiction after Moby-Dick, 1851-1857

By: William V. Spanos

Argues that Herman Melville’s later work anticipates the resurgence of an American exceptionalist ethos underpinning the U.S.-led global “war on terror.”

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Page Count

296

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791477746

ISBN 13

9780791477748

The Errant Art of Moby-Dick

The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies

By: William V. Spanos

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The Errant Art of Moby-Dick

The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies

By: William V. Spanos

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396

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822315998

ISBN 13

9780822315995

Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum

An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation

By: William V. Spanos

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Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum

An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation

By: William V. Spanos

Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum interrogates the polyvalent role that American exceptionalism continues to play after 9/11. Whereas American exceptionalism is often construed as a discredited Cold War-era belief structure, Spanos persuasively demonstrates how it operationalizes an apparatus of biopolitical capture that saturates the American body politic down to its capillaries. The exceptionalism that Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum renders starkly visible is not a corrigible ideological screen. It is a deeply structured ethos that functions simultaneously on ontological, moral, economic, racial, gendered, and political registers as the American Calling. Precisely by refusing to answer the American Calling, by rendering inoperative (in Agamben's sense) its covenantal summons, Spanos enables us to imagine an alternative America. At once timely and personal, Spanos's meditation acknowledges the priority of being. He emphasizes the dignity not simply of humanity but of all phenomena on the continuum of being, "the groundless ground of any political formation that would claim the name of democracy.

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