num_pages: 280
description: 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.This collection of twelve essays has as its framework the questioning of traditional identities, hierarchies, interpretive methods, and conceptions of the literary that mark Foucault's contribution to literary criticism, theory, and history. While some of the essays provide examples of what Foucault wrote, others rethink the period of German literature covered by the volume as an enactment of Foucault's theoretical and methodological insights. Many of the essays are less strict applications of what he wrote than attempts to think what he wrote further and to expand or modify his discourse. Offering a wide range of approaches, the contributors look for traces of subjection, discipline, normalization, and institutionalization in German literature of the period and demonstrate how the "institution" of literature becomes both a textbook and an instance of power.The volume reads "after" Foucault in a number of ways. First, the readings occur after his decisive insights into the archive, the statement, discourse, and the pivotal function of the institutional and disciplinary conditions of their possibility. Second, the readings operate under the assumptions of discourse-analytical procedure; they seek to articulate at a discursive level, the fissures and breaks inherent within discourses and writing systems. Third, the readings attempt to work through the problematics of texts, statements, and circuits of communication and to unfold the discursive preconditions of specific forms of writing and self-production. Finally, Reading After Foucault 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, Holderlin, Hamann, and Novalis are featured.
language: English
title: Reading After Foucault: Institutions, Disciplines, and Technologies of the Self in Germany, 1750-1830
titlecomplete: Reading After Foucault: Institutions, Disciplines, and Technologies of the Self in Germany, 1750-1830 (Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural S)
publisher: Wayne State Univ Pr