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National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) - David B. Downing

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281 pages

English

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In Just Theory, David Downing offers an alternative history of critical theory in the context of the birth and transformation of the Western philosophical tradition.

Rather than providing a summary survey, it situates the production of theoretical texts within the geopolitical economy of just two pivotal cultural turns: Cultural Turn 1 (roughly 450–350 BCE) looks at the Platonic revolution, during which a new philosophic, universalist, and literate discourse emerged from what had long been an oral culture; Cultural Turn 2 (roughly 1770–1870) investigates the Romantic revolution and its nineteenth-century aftermath up to the Paris Commune.

While focusing on the quest for social justice, Downing situates the two cultural turns within deep time: Cultural Turn 1 gave birth to the Western philosophical tradition during the Holocene; Cultural Turn 2 witnessed the beginnings of the shift to the Anthropocene when the Industrial Revolution and the fossil fuel age began to alter our complex biospheres and geospheres. As described in the epilogue, the aftereffects of Western metaphysics have dramatically shaped our twenty-first-century world, especially for teachers and scholars in English and the humanities.

Sujets

Critical Theory

Movements

Language Arts

Subjects

Teaching

PHILOSOPHY

EDUCATION

Philosophie et théologie

General officer

Subject

Western canon

Rhetoric

General

Informations

Publié par	National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
Date de parution	14 février 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780814100417
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,2250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Just Theory
NCTE E DITORIAL B OARD : Steven Bickmore, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Deborah Dean, Antero Garcia, Bruce McComiskey, Jennifer Ochoa, Staci M. Perryman-Clark, Anne Elrod Whitney, Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, Kurt Austin, Chair, ex officio, Emily Kirkpatrick, ex officio

Publication acknowledgment: Chapter 8 , “The Struggle between Communality and Hierarchy: Lessons of the Paris Commune for the Twenty-First Century,” is derived in part from an article published in Socialism and Democracy , available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/08854300.2018.1513757 .
Staff Editor: Bonny Graham Manuscript Editor: Lee Erwin Interior Design: Jenny Jensen Greenleaf Cover Design: Pat Mayer Cover Images: iStock.com/serts ; Wellcome Images; Wikimedia Commons
NCTE Stock Number: 25304; eStock Number: 25328 ISBN 978-0-8141-2530-4; eISBN 978-0-8141-2532-8
©2019 by the National Council of Teachers of English.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright holder. Printed in the United States of America.
It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.
NCTE provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all staff members and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical, mental or perceived handicap/disability, sexual orientation including gender identity or expression, ancestry, genetic information, marital status, military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, pregnancy, citizenship status, personal appearance, matriculation or political affiliation, or any other protected status under applicable federal, state, and local laws.
Every effort has been made to provide current URLs and email addresses, but because of the rapidly changing nature of the web, some sites and addresses may no longer be accessible.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Downing, David B., 1947- author.
Title: Just theory : an alternative history of the western tradition / David B. Downing, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Description: Urbana, Illinois : National Council of Teachers of English, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018053942 (print) | LCCN 2019002400 (ebook) | ISBN 9780814125328 (ebook) | ISBN 9780814125304 ((pbk))
Subjects: LCSH: Justice (Philosophy) | Knowledge, Theory of. | Metaphysics.
Classification: LCC B105.J87 (ebook) | LCC B105.J87 D68 2019 (print) | DDC 190–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053942
For Joan
Contents

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P REFACE : W HAT I S J UST T HEORY ?
Cultural Turn 1. Inventing Western Metaphysics
1 Introduction: Framing the Common Good
2 Why Is Plato So Upset at the Poets, and What Is Western Metaphysics?
3 Reframing the Republic : From the Homeric to the Platonic Paideia
4 Finding Love (and Writing) in All the Wrong Places: Plato's Pharmacy and the Double-Edged Sword of Literacy in the Phaedrus
5 Aristotle's Natural Classification of Things: When Dialectic Trumps Rhetoric and Poetry Gets Rescued
Cultural Turn 2. Rewriting Western Metaphysics: Aesthetics and Politics in the Age of Capital
6 Rewriting Western Metaphysics for a Revolutionary Age
7 The Prelude to the Revolution: The Limits of Literary Freedom in a Market Society
8 Women's Rights, Class Wars, and the Master-Slave Dialectic: Signs of the Rising Countermovements
9 The Struggle between Communality and Hierarchy: Lessons of the Paris Commune for the Twenty-First Century
10 From God's Great Chain to Nature's Slow-Motion Evolution: Reframing Our Regulative Fictions
Cultural Turn 3. Surviving the Sixth Extinction and Resolving the Crisis of Care
Epilogue
N OTES
W ORKS C ITED
I NDEX
A UTHOR
A cknowledgments

I have written this book for my graduate students. Twice a year for thirty years in our Literature and Criticism doctoral program, I taught various iterations of a course called “The History of Criticism and Theory.” Students brought different perspectives and challenging questions to the course, and this engagement with so many important issues greatly enriched my writing of this book. By my calculation I have now had nearly nine hundred students pass through this seminar. Unfortunately, there's simply no way to thank each by name, so I apologize for this generic note of gratitude.
I want to thank my colleagues who serve or have served in the IUP Literature and Criticism Program: Gail Berlin, James Cahalan, Susan Comfort, Ron Emerick, Tanya Heflin, Melanie Holm, Maurice Kilwein Guevara, Chris Kuipers, Chris Orchard, Mike Sell, Ken Sherwood, Tom Slater, Veronica Watson, Michael T. Williamson, and Lingyan Yang. They have provided a remarkably supportive environment, and it has been my pleasure to work with them. The friendship and commitment to high standards and fair working conditions of Gian Pagnucci, chair of the IUP English department, means a great deal to me; assistant chair Todd Thompson (also an L&C colleague) has also been a wonderful friend who has made all of our lives at IUP better since he arrived in 2008. The former directors of the Composition and TESOL Program, Sharon Deckert and Ben Rafoth, were a pleasure to work with during the nine years when I served as director of L&C. Together with the other members of the English department, they made it possible for me to teach and write about things that matter to me. Finally, my dean, Yaw Asamoah, exemplifies a progressive administrator dedicated to the faculty he serves. IUP also granted me both a sabbatical leave and a research award that have helped me complete this book.
This is a long book that has taken me a long time to write, so I really have a lifetime of gratitude for the many colleagues whose conversations and work influenced me in ways that I cannot easily enumerate but that deserve my thanks: Abdullah Al-Dagamseh, Jonathan Arac, Susan Bazargan, Jim Berlin, Don Bialostosky, David Bleich, Michael Blitz, Paul Bové, Kay Boyle, William Cain, Sean Carswell, Ed Carvalho, Leonard Cassuto, Tom Caulfield, Cathy Chaput, Ward Churchill, Ralph Cintrón, Deborah Clarke, Victor Cohen, Teresa Derrickson, Jeffrey DiLeo, Edem Dzregah, Leslie Fiedler, Kevin Floyd, Barbara Foley, Grover Furr, Henry Giroux, Susan Searls Giroux, Robin Truth Goodman, Gerald Graff, Giles Gunn, John Herold, Ruth Hoberman, Patrick Hogan, Claude Mark Hurlbert, Tracy Lassiter, Vincent Leitch, Melissa Lingle-Martin, Steven Mailloux, Jeffrey Markovitz, Paula Mathieu, Sophia McClennen, Eric Meljac, Ellen Messer-Davidow, John Mowitt, Greg Myerson, David Raybin, Joe Ramsey, Ken Saltman, Jeffrey Schragel, John Schilb, Leroy Searle, Cynthia Selfe, David Shumway, Heather Steffen, Ron Strickland, Richard Sylvia, Alan Trachtenberg, Harold Veeser, Victor Vitanza, Evan Watkins, and Martha Woodmansee.
My career-long friend and mentor Arthur Efron first showed me what radical critique and anarchism were all about. Since graduate school, Brian Caraher has been a great friend, intellectual comrade, and one of the original founders of Works and Days . I am also very grateful for James Sosnoski and Patricia Harkin, with whom I collaborated for many years; Richard Ohmann represents for me what it means to be a committed intellectual; Marc Bousquet's friendship combined with his stunning analysis of the contemporary university always leads me in new directions; and Jeff Williams, a wonderful friend in the neighborhood, read long sections of this manuscript and offered invaluable advice.
I had the good fortune, once again, to work with exemplary editors and readers at NCTE. A special note of thanks to Kurt Austin, who patiently helped me work through the editorial stages from the proposal, through the readers’ reports, to all stages of the editing and publication process. His advice has always been spot on. I have also benefited from having extremely careful readers of the manuscript, so I thank them all for improving the book. I especially want to thank Bonny Graham, who was my production editor at NCTE, and the copyeditors who did an outstanding job with the entire manuscript and saved me from more mistakes of my own than I would like to admit. Any remaining mistakes are, of course, of my own making.
My extended family may not always know exactly what I am up to in my writing, but I am always grateful for their unending support, so I thank John and Sue Clippinger, Rena and Alon Mei-Tal, and Mike and Rosemary Whitney. No words can express my gratitude for my children and grandchildren: Peter, Katie, Nico, and Elliot; Jordan, Kurt, Simone, and Julian. And, of course, my lifetime partner and spouse, Joan, to whom this book is dedicated.
P REFACE : W HAT I S J UST T HEORY ?
J ust Theory offers an alternative history of critical theory in the context of the birth and transformation of the Western philosophical tradition. But rather than a summary survey, it situates the production of theoretical texts within the geopolitical economy of just two pivotal cultural turns. Especially in the fifth to fourth centuries BCE, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and their cohorts in Athens brought into being a whole new discourse called philosophy. From this bustling southern Mediterranean city, population nearly 300,000 at the time (although only about 40,000 males had the status of citizens), we can now trace forward a 2,500-year history of the aftereffects of what has been calle