How many illusions of everyday life must Leftist culture unmask before it confronts its own, empty vision? The collapse of America's Vietnam War effort ended the drama of impending Final Conflict between progressive forces and the ruling class. Since dien, Leftist culture has moved back into a situation structurally similar to the rest of American culture: whether Leftist or mainstream, culture, as is, functions to provide the only legitimate forum for public confrontation with the universal crisis of personal identity within (...) the vast wash of our society. The writers in Cultures in Contention demand more. (shrink)

In a remarkable range of disciplines — from legal studies to architecture, from art history to rock music — there is emerging a paradoxically unified approach to the theory of contemporary cultural dissolution. In the humanities in America, three major post-structuralist philosophic movements may be discerned, each describing a separate facet of traditional disciplinary studies yet all having a remarkable cross-departmental impact. These are the anti-foundationalism of Richard Rorty and other end-of-the-line philosophers in the American pragmatist tradition, the textual deconstructionists (...) who swim about Jacques Derrida, and the revisers of Western Marxism, such as Fredric Jameson, various Parisians, and Terry Eagleton, who dialectically step out of history into its forms to tease the future out of the maw of capitalism. (shrink)