This interdisciplinary work provides the conditions for the possibility of rethinking the foundations of hermeneutics in relation to postmodern concerns regarding the political and the aesthetic, and makes a major contribution to a new philosophy of film and post-Heideggerian thought.

This book examines the work of key philosophers - Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Irigaray, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, Fouault, Bateille, Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze. Their work is examined in the context of visibility, expressivity, the representational and the postmodern.

Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. provides a basic, broad, and dynamic introduction to a new manner of reading history in light of current theoretical innovations and multiculturalist theories. In order to prepare the reader for this novel historicality, the author guides the reader through an enormous terrain of texts in modernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, poetics, and multiculturalism. Just from this standpoint, one may regard Berkhofer's work as a major contribution to the history of contemporary thought. His text, however, exceeds writing another (...) history of ideas precisely by his attempts to transform the way historians regard their texts. Although not specifically delineated, the book consists of two parts: The first half explores some of the implications of postmodernism for the writing, reading, and teaching of history. It shows how historians are able to learn from current deconstructive strategies without being bound to this kind of textualizing. The second half discloses various ways of "applying" a positive understanding of postmodernism to the urgent operation of reading concrete historical texts. (shrink)