Walter Benn Michaels

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Walter Benn Michaels (* 1948 ) is an American literary theorist .

He is best known for Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004). Michael's work has raised arguments and questions on a number of topics central to literary studies: problems of culture and race, personal and national identity, the difference between memory and history, disagreement and diversity, and meaning and intention in interpretations .

Life

Michaels received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1970 and received his doctorate there in 1975. He then taught from 1974 to 1977 and again from 1987 to 2001 at Johns Hopkins University and from 1977 to 1987 at the University of California, Berkeley . Since 2001 he has taught at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

He is best known for his study of American naturalism The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; American Literature at the Turn of the Century , published in 1987.

Michaels is also valued for his teaching work. His article "Against Theory", co-authored with Steven Knapp , was included in the Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism .

He is currently Professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois, where he was Head from 2001 to 2007.

plant

In Our Americas , Michaels argues that American nativist modernism of the 1920s was a phase of "research and development" on an identity concept that would shape the American world of ideas in the twentieth century. Linked to this thesis is Michael's assertion that nativist modernism has established the strategy of answering the question of the culture one should adopt by first determining one's race. He explains that "the idea of ​​cultural identity - despite the fact that it has been commonly presented in recent years as an alternative to racial identity - is in fact an extension of racial identity not only historically but logically" at the center The book states that Michaels denies that the concept of cultural identity, and identity in general, has become a description of the practices and values ​​of a group, but rather the object of an essentialist striving to become what one already is.

Michaels' criticism of identity continued over the following decade, particularly in his next book, The Shape of the Signifier . The procedure in this work, as in the previous one, is to reveal the common logic of positions that are viewed as politically opposed. What does it mean, the book asks itself, that a liberal thinker like Arthur M. Schlesinger and a multiculturalist author like Toni Morrison both have an interest in rewriting history - something to be learned - as a kind of memory - something to be experienced? Furthermore, what does it mean for Paul de Man and other post-structuralists to concentrate on the “materiality of the signifier” - how words look or feel at the expense of their meaning - an interest they seem to share with contemporary writers like Kathy Acker and Bret Easton Ellis and with contemporary science fiction writers like Kim Stanley Robinson ? Michael's book suggests that what these strategies have in common is the development towards a primacy of the subject position, a primacy from which the question of who someone is - i.e. one's own identity - appears more important than the question of what someone means.

The War on Terror only perfected this development when, as Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington seemed to say, it made any question of ideological disagreement about capitalism and social organization seem unimportant. Because in the War on Terror , in the words of President George W. Bush, one is either for America or against it, and thus on the side of the "bad guys".

The movement of Michael's logic proceeds by reading homologies and simultaneities where otherwise significant differences are seen. Like some other well-known political theorists (such as Nancy Fraser ), Michaels also believes that the talk of identity has replaced an argument about economic inequality - there is now a politics of recognition, but not a politics of redistribution. Michaels makes this point in his 2006 book The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality , where he emphasizes that America is too preoccupied with issues of race at the expense of issues of class .

Works (selection, English)

Essays

Books

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "The idea of ​​cultural identity - despite the fact that in recent years it has customarily been presented as an alternative to racial identity - is in fact, not only historically but logically, an extension of racial identity" (Michaels, "Response") .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Michaels, Walter Benn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary theorist
DATE OF BIRTH 1948