In Just Theory, David Downing offers an alternative history of critical theory in the context of the birth and transformation of the Western philosophical tradition.
Rather than providing a summary survey, it situates the production of theoretical texts within the geopolitical economy of just two pivotal cultural turns: Cultural Turn 1 (roughly 450–350 BCE) looks at the Platonic revolution, during which a new philosophic, universalist, and literate discourse emerged from what had long been an oral culture; Cultural Turn 2 (roughly 1770–1870) investigates the Romantic revolution and its nineteenth-century aftermath up to the Paris Commune.
While focusing on the quest for social justice, Downing situates the two cultural turns within deep time: Cultural Turn 1 gave birth to the Western philosophical tradition during the Holocene; Cultural Turn 2 witnessed the beginnings of the shift to the Anthropocene when the Industrial Revolution and the fossil fuel age began to alter our complex biospheres and geospheres. As described in the epilogue, the aftereffects of Western metaphysics have dramatically shaped our twenty-first-century world, especially for teachers and scholars in English and the humanities.
Circa l’autore
David B. Downing is Distinguished University Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he has been teaching for thirty years. His scholarship over the past two decades has contributed to what many have called Critical University Studies. As editor of the journal Works and Days, his recent special volumes have included, among others, "Information University: Rise of the Education Management Organization" (2003); "Education as Revolution" (2013); "Scholactivism: Reflections on Transforming Praxis Inside and Outside the Classroom" (2016); and "Capitalism, Climate Change, and Rhetoric" (2018). Downing is the author of The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace (2010) and the editor or coeditor of Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era (2010), Beyond English, Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy (2002), and several other books.
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