Go here to find a quick list of our books.

vol. 1

Ethics/Aesthetics: Post-Modern Positions

Robert Merrill, editor

Library of Congress Catalog Number B151.E74

195 pages

publication date May 1, 1988

Library binding $26.95 ISBN 0-944624-00-6 or ISBN-13 9780944624005

Paperback $12.95 ISBN 0-944624-01-4 or ISBN-13 9780944624012

Postmodernism and poststructuralism recognize no vantage points outside of the practice of art and politics, no transcendental signifiers to structure the experience of reality. That stance creates great problems for the old equations of the good and the beautiful, and it makes discussions of art deeply political in the sense all art embodies some particular social construction and economy of power. It also makes discussions of the political fully artistic in the sense of the imaginary transformations of the world.

We have also learned to understand social situations, ourselves, and institutions essentially as “texts” which must be decoded with the same strategies for reading, looking, and listening that we employ for works of art. Our perceptual categories give shape to the reality of the world in the only way that it can ever or could ever have been.

These eight authors expand the discourse of ethics and aesthetics to include a taxonomy of post-modernism, legitimation, power, subjectivity, semiology history, TV, and the bomb. Includes Anthony Cascardi, Geoffrey Harpham, Eugene Holland, Rob Wilson, Linda Hutcheon, Neal Oxenhandler, and others.

Robert Merrill is Professor of Humanities and Literature at the Maryland Institute College or Art in Baltimore where he also served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. He has taught at Penn State and at Catholic University in Washington, DC. He has published and lectured on contemporary culture and issues surrounding war and human rights. He is also the founder of the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies.

Click here for Table of Contents.