Reading After Foucault

Contributes to Foucauldian scholarship by contextualizing Foucault's key concepts and identifying current and emerging applications of his work.

Throughout American history, women's roles have been a source of controversy. Despite having to struggle to be heard or listened to, women vigorously participated in the political debates and cultural lives of American society. They responded actively to the social problems of their day, joining anti-slavery and temperance groups in the nineteenth century, only to discover that gender hindered their right to speak or act in public. Such limitations led to the women's rights movement and a long struggle for the vote and full citizenship rights.

Reading After Foucault presents new readings of German literature, letters, and culture from 1750 to 1830, based upon the pioneering work of the late Michel Foucault. Discussing the structures of historical-thought systems, the emergence of the human sciences, modern institutions of reading and writing, and technologies of self-fashioning, the authors extend Foucault's research into the system of writing technologies and power relations and reexamine the canon and the disciplines and institutions which make it possible. The book seeks to contribute to a "history of the present" by analyzing the networks in and through which literary modernity has been manufactured. New readings of Wezel, Kleist, Reinhold, Herder, Schiller, Campe, Goethe, the story of Kaspar Hauser, Hölderlin, Hamann, and Novalis are featured.

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

Both as historian and maker of culture, Foucault infused numerous disciplines of study with a new conceptual vocabulary and an agenda for future research. His ideas have called central assumptions in Western culture into question and altered the ways in which scholars and social scientists approach such issues as discourse theory, theory of knowledge, Eros, technologies of the Self and Other, punishment and prisons, and asylums and madness.The contributors to this volume indicate Foucault's achievements and the suggestive power of his work, as well as his methodological weaknesses, historical inaccuracies, and ambiguities. Above all, they attempt to show how one can use Foucault to go beyond him in opening new approaches to cultural history. Though comprehensiveness was not attempted, their essays broach the major controversial aspects of Foucauldian cultural history--the position of the subject, the fusion of power and knowledge, sexuality, the historical structures and changes--and they explicitly analyze them with respect to antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century.In this collection, Neubauer presents analyses by historians, literary scholars, and philosophers of the entire, transdisciplinary range of Foucault's oeuvre, emphasizing the rich suggestiveness of its agenda. The breadth of the undertaking makes it suitable for seminars and graduate courses in numerous departments.

The essays in this collection assess the impact of Michel Foucault's work on the conditions of disciplinary knowledge in humanistic studies and speculate on the directions we might take from his work. They cover a wide range of fundamental concerns; from philosophy of knowledge in both theoreticl and applied forms, to philology, history, psychoanalysis, feminism and politics. Whether the contributors would be counted as being for or against Foucault, all of them show that their understanding has been altered by the challenges his work has posed. In some cases Foucault's thought is severly criticized as an obstacle to effective understanding or action; in others, his thought offers a resource through which received opinion can be displayed.

Michel Foucault was a twentieth-century philosopher of extraordinary talent, a political activist, social theorist, cultural critic and creative historian. He shaped the ways we think today about such controversial issues as power, sexuality, madness and criminality. Johanna Oksala explores the conceptual tools that Foucault gave us for constructing new forms of thinking as well as for smashing old certainties. She offers a lucid account of him as a thinker whose persistent aim was to challenge the self-evidence and seeming inevitability of our current experiences, practices and institutions by showing their historical development and, therefore, contingency. Extracts are taken from the whole range of Foucault's writings - his books, essays, lectures and interviews - including the major works History of Madness,The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro's excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series. Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault's key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today. While there are many texts that survey Foucault's thought, these are often more general overviews or biographical précis that give little in the way of robust explanation and discussion. In contrast, How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish takes a plain-speaking, yet detailed, approach, specifically designed to give students a thorough understanding of one of the most influential texts in contemporary cultural theory.