Walter Benn Michaels

Walter Benn Michaels (born 1948) is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004).

Biography

Michaels earned his BA in 1970 and PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Afterwards, he taught at Johns Hopkins University (1974–1977, 1987–2001) and the University of California, Berkeley (1977–1987). Since 2001, he has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Department of English, for which he has served as Head (2001–2007).

"Against Theory", an article co-written by Michaels and Steven Knapp, is included in the Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism. His study of American Naturalism, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; American Literature at the Turn of the Century, was published in 1987.

Selected works

Essays

"Against Theory", Critical Inquiry 8.4 (Summer 1982): 723–42.
"The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Christopher Nolan's Idea of Form", ebr: the electronic book review (1 October 2007).
"Going Boom", (February/March 2009).
"Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Ranciere and the Form of the Photograph", nonsite.org (2011)
"Interview on Photography and Politics", nonsite.org (2011)
"Meaning and Affect", nonsite.org (2012)
"The Beauty of a Social Problem", The Brooklyn Rail (October 2011)

Books

The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan, 2006.
The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1987.

Interviews

"Let Them Eat Diversity" (Jacobin, Winter 2011).

gollark: <@199529131224989696> I was thinking about stuff recently, and you know when you said `allow for introspection, imagination and probably also analysis of the outside world` when I asked `What does consciousness actually do, though?`Maybe you would need some form of consciousness, whatever that is, for introspection, but you don't for "imagination" and "analysis of the outside world". You can do those with simple "AI" like we use for games.

gollark: !txet sdrawkcab em eviG

gollark: Unfortunately.

gollark: Yes, xkcd advertised it some years back.

gollark: U+202E is fun too but discord has no support.

References

External links

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