世新大學圖書館

Includes bibliographical references (p. 259-278) and index.

pt. 1. Interrogations: "To read what was never written": from deconstruction to a poetics of redemption -- From Bakhtin to Gramsci: intertextuality, praxis, hegemony -- Arguments with Marxist critical theory -- pt. 2. Reconfigurations: Prospectus to an aesthetics of "imaginary relations" -- Ideological form, symbolic exchange, textual production: a reading of Hemingway's For whom the bells toll -- Hugh MacDiarmid: towards a materialistic poetics -- pt. 3. Interventions: James Baldwin's dialectical imagination -- History and representation: symbolizing the Asian diaspora in the United States -- Beyond postmodernism: notes on "Third World" discourses of resistance -- Multiculturalism and the challenge of world cultural studies.

In Part One, the author examines what is at stake in the complex relations between theory and practice in exchanges involving Paul de Man, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and others. In Part Two, San Juan focuses on the materialist aesthetics of Louis Althusser and Pierre Machercy, examining their resonance in a Hemingway novel and in the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid. In Part Three, the author conducts an appraisal of James Baldwin's worldview, the textualization of the Asian diaspora in the United States, and the interface between postmodern themes and "postcolonial" sensibilities.

The ultimate project of the author is to envision the emergence of a new field called "world cultural studies" from a radical "Third World" perspective. The transition from Western "hegemony" to the transformative, oppositional inquiry of "Others" epitomizes the itinerary of San Juan's exploration of the discipline once called litterae humaniores but now reconceived as the praxis of critical transgressions.