The Age of the World Target

Martin Heidegger once wrote that the world had, in the age of modern science, become a world picture. For Rey Chow, the world has, in the age of atomic bombs, become a world target, to be attacked once it is identified, or so global geopolitics, dominated by the United States since the end of the Second World War, seems repeatedly to confirm. How to articulate the problematics of knowledge production with this aggressive targeting of the world? Chow attempts such an articulation by probing the significance of the chronological proximity of area studies, poststructuralist theory, and comparative literature - fields of inquiry that have each exerted considerable influence but whose mutual implicatedness as post-war U.S. academic phenomena has seldom been theorized. Central to Chow's discussions is a critique of the predicament of self-referentiality - the compulsive move to interiorize that, in her view, constitutes the collective frenzy of our age - in different contemporary epistemic registers, including the self-consciously avant-garde as well as the militaristic and culturally supremacist. Urging her readers to think beyond the inward-turning focus on EuroAmerica that tends to characterize even the most radical gestures of Western self-deconstruction, Chow envisions much broader intellectual premises for future trans-cultural work, with reading practices aimed at restoring words and things to their constitutive exteriority.

ISBN 0822337444   Pages 136 ISBN13 9780822337447 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Duke University Press   Weight (grammes) 209 Imprint Duke University Press   Published in North Carolina Format Paperback   Series title Next Wave: Provocations Publication date 26 Jun 2006   Height (mm) 236 Library of Congress 2005029786   Width (mm) 176 DEWEY 801   Spine width (mm) 10 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

		Introduction : European theory in America		1
I		The age of the world target : atomic bombs, alterity, area studies		25
II		The interruption of referentiality; or, poststructuralism's outside		45
III		The old/new question of comparison in literary studies : a post-European perspective		71

"Rey Chow is one of the most learned and imaginative left critics writing today, and The Age of the World Target is possibly her finest book yet. Elegantly traversing philosophy, literature, history, and politics, Chow refracts our political times through our academic practices in a fashion that is alternately pedagogical, biting, lyrical, and profound." Wendy Brown, author of Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics "The Age of the World Target is a catalyzing tour de force. Rey Chow provides a poignant, persuasive staging of a topic that will shape the future of literary and cultural studies: the role of particular poststructuralist claims within the fields of area studies, identity politics, and comparative literature."--Bill Brown, author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature

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