Theory as Resistance: Politics and Culture after (Post)structuralism

by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton

Book by Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud, Morton, Donald

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers an insightful account on the debates surrounding curriculum reforms as a site of class struggle. Zavarzadeh and Morton presents a sharp critique of the various strands of (post)structuralist theory that leading U.S. universities began to incorporate in the 1980s and the 1990s. Far from presenting a progressive turn in the academe, these 'new' theories of cultural criticism simply repackaged the same legitimization of the capitalist system and disdain for radical social change that the old 'humanist' curriculum represented.

Against the traditional curriculum which aims to instill universal human values (which transcend class, race, or gender) and the fashionable new (post)structuralist theories that offers a new formalism reveling in the 'pleasures of the text', Zavarzadeh and Morton pushes for a 'Political Economy of Knowledge' which reads signs of culture as the outcome of contradicting interests between classes and social forces. I found this work of particular interest for a better understanding of the ongoing curriculum reforms in the Philippines in the service of multinational capital.

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

lumabas sa "language games"

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

one of the more outre hardcore leftwing cultural/literary theorists.