Cultural semantics: keywords of our time

Abstract

A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about that matter - and about why matter. Borrowing from Flaubert's notion of a dictionary of received ideas and Raymond Williams's explorations of the keywords of the modern age, Jay investigates some of the central concepts by which we currently organize our thoughts and lives. His topics range from theory and experience to the meaning of multiculturalism and the dynamics of cultural subversion. Among the thinkers he engages are Bataille and Foucault, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Christa Wolf. By looking closely at what words do and perform, Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. By helping to distance us from much that we now take for granted, he makes it difficult for us to remain comfortably certain about what we think we know.

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