Books by Marc Redfield

Working from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the politics of border crossings, the policing of identities, and the linguistic performances on which such actions depend.

Marc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For...

This book suggests that modern cultural and critical institutions have persistently associated questions of aesthetics and politics with literature, theory, technics, and Romanticism.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did symbolic as well as literal damage. This book includes two interlinked essays that proposes the notion of virtual traumato that describe the cultural wound that this name-date both deflects and relays. It examines the historical and philosophical infrastructure of the notion of war on terror.

More than twenty years after his death, Paul de Man remains a haunting presence in the American academy. This work analyzes and evaluates aspects of de Man's powerful legacy. It focuses on: his great theme of "reading"; his complex notions of "history," "materiality," and "aesthetic ideology"; and his institutional role as a teacher.