Defending Culture: Conceptual Foundations And Contemporary Debate
by Johan Fornäs /
2017 / English / PDF
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This book concerns the implications and interrelations of key
concepts of culture, defending an updated communicative notion of
culture as meaning-making against a series of current challenges.
The first part of the book distinguishes four main concepts of
culture, presenting their histories, uses, limitations and mutual
contradictions, which else often tend to be neglected. The second
part scrutinizes neomaterialist and posthumanist critics’
antihermeneutic efforts to escape the spirals of interpretation and
meaning. Learning from such contestations, the third part
summarizes the arguments and in five theses reconstructs a
contemporary and comprehensive agenda for cultural studies, based
on creative imagination and communicative mediation in the dynamic
interface between meaning and materiality. This thus provides a
survey of fundamental concepts and theories of culture for students
and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, while
simultaneously also serving as an introductory guide to the
contemporary debate in this field.
This book concerns the implications and interrelations of key
concepts of culture, defending an updated communicative notion of
culture as meaning-making against a series of current challenges.
The first part of the book distinguishes four main concepts of
culture, presenting their histories, uses, limitations and mutual
contradictions, which else often tend to be neglected. The second
part scrutinizes neomaterialist and posthumanist critics’
antihermeneutic efforts to escape the spirals of interpretation and
meaning. Learning from such contestations, the third part
summarizes the arguments and in five theses reconstructs a
contemporary and comprehensive agenda for cultural studies, based
on creative imagination and communicative mediation in the dynamic
interface between meaning and materiality. This thus provides a
survey of fundamental concepts and theories of culture for students
and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, while
simultaneously also serving as an introductory guide to the
contemporary debate in this field.