From Library Journal
This new collection of seven essays, most previously published, simultaneously explores and performs what Mann calls the impossibility and "abject necessity" of critical theory and cultural criticism. The title concept and unifying theme, a neologism formed from "masochism" and "criticism," is the subject of one essay. The others extend his thinking about the avant-garde, offer readings of Bataille and Nietzsche, take provocative looks at critical discourses of warfare and the critical fascination with "stupid" underground movements in popular culture, and wrestle with the problem of ethics in current cultural thought. Mann's analyses are self-conscious, well informed, and cogently written, though his ideas and arguments are likely to be accessible and interesting mostly to theoretically sophisticated students and scholars.?Julia Burch, MIT Media Lab., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
These provocative, inventive, and at times outrageous essays on literary theory, philosophy, and cultural criticism describe, in their form and content, the end of criticism, even while performing the endlessness of that endgame. In a sense, the book deconstructs all forms of critique and criticism, including deconstruction, and including its own self. That the book is so painfully aware of the futility of its own enterprise, even while pursuing it relentlessly and with such critical rigor, is what makes this a book of masocriticism as well as about masocriticism.
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