School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemMarxism and literary history(Harvard University Press, 1986)In this book I try to theorize the concepts of system and history for a Marxist theory of literary discourse. This theorization is conceived as part of a semiotically oriented intervention in cultural politics. I am not interested in producing a general Marxist theory of literature or in contributing to an aesthetics; and I do not attempt a philosophical purification of these categories. They are difficult categories and I seek to make them more so; but the point is to make them fit tools for critical and political uses. I use the concept of system in the sense of a nontotalized formation which sets epistemological and practical limits to discourse, and which is thereby productive of discourse; it does not have here its speculative or its systems-theoretical sense of a closed and self-regulating totality. In addition, I seek consistently to deploy the concept in counterpoint to its ongoing deconstruction. In the same way, the concept of history does not carry the sense of an enfolding narrative continuum or of the given ground of human action. It is used to theorize the discontinuous, nonteleological dynamic of the literary system and the multiple temporalities of texts within complex sets of intertextual relations. The theoretical framework and intent of the book is a nondogmatic and nonorthodox Marxism which I hope will require no apology. I work within an antihumanist, antihistoricist, and anti-Hegelian tradition, but am also intellectually close to the post-structuralism of Foucault and Derrida. The interplay and sometimes the strain between these traditions will be evident (I hope fruitfully) throughout the book.
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ItemClass and aulture: funding the arts( 1986)Funding the arts involves translating judgements of aesthetic and social value into cash terms. It takes the form of a subsidy paid to certain parts of an industry and not to others, and it requires the mediation of often irreconcilable interests. This is not to say that the question of funding for the arts is thoroughly political, and that it is fraught with quite specific difficulties. Rowse's book is a lucid and intelligent account of some of the them, and it is the most persuasive argument we've yet had in Australia for a reformulation of policy priorities in relation to the arts. It also, and incidentally, poses a serious challenge to the traditional philosophical bases of aesthetic theory.
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ItemSpectacle, binding: on character( 1986)The concept of character is perhaps the most problematic and the most undertheorized of the basic categories of narrative theory. It is also perhaps the most widely-used of all critical tools, at all levels of analysis; and its sheer obviousness disguises the conceptual difficulties it presents.