Jay M. Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time

Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. — 272 p. — ISBN10: 1558491163; ISBN13: 978-1558491168.A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter—and about why ideas matter. Borrowing from Flaubert's notion of a dictionary of "received ideas" and Raymond Williams's explorations of the "keywords" of the modern age, Jay investigates some of the central concepts by which we currently organize our thoughts and lives. His topics range from "theory" and "experience" to the meaning of "multiculturalism" and the dynamics of cultural "subversion." Among the thinkers he engages are Bataille and Foucault, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Walter Benjamin, Christa Wolf, and Jean-François Lyotard. By looking closely at what "words do and perform," Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. By helping to distance us from much that we now take for granted, he makes it difficult for us to remain comfortably certain about what we think we know. Elegantly written and richly insightful, this is a work of cultural criticism and intellectual analysis of the first order.For Theory
European Intellectual History and the Specter of Multiculturalism
Songs of Experience: Reflections on the Debate over Alltagsgeschichte
Experience without a Subject: Walter Benjamin and the Novel
The Limits of Limit-Experience: Bataille and Foucault
No Power to the Soviets
Who's Afraid of Christa Wolf? Thoughts on the Dynamics of Cultural Subversion
Postmodern Fascism? Reflections on the Return of the Repressed
Educating the Educators
The Aesthetic Alibi
Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe
The Academic Woman as Performance Artist
Abjection Overruled
The Uncanny Nineties
Modernism and the Specter of Psychologism
Modern and Postmodern Paganism: Peter Gay and Jean-François Lyotard
The Manacles of Gavrilo PrincipNotes