Product Description <br/><br/>"A stunning, superb exploration. In a series of challenging theoretical arguments and close readings, McGee demonstrates the various ways that literature and theory can get beyond the reigning meanings that normally constrain our interpretations of the world, the text, and the critic. Breathtaking in its scope, the discussion offers a vital resource for cultural criticism."<br/>--Gregory S. Jay, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee<br/><br/><br/><br/>In this provocative and illuminating book, Patrick McGee looks at the ways in which certain texts resist the dominant cultural assumptions that condition their writing and reception. Challenging received notions of aesthetic and social value, he offers readings of modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial works which suggest forms of relationship disruptive of social systems and institutional hierarchies.<br/><br/> Review <br/><br/>"The critical dialectic developed within the study's separate chapters between 'theory' and 'literature' offsets and is offset by the historical dialectic of the chapters themselves: the cultural capital of the capital as theoretical premise for the negotiations of the value of literary status and membership in the union of critical interests."<br/>--Barbara Harlow,<br/>NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction<br/><br/>"Anyone concerned with the fate of modernist literatures, and especially with the global implications of twentieth-century writing, must come to terms with<br/>Telling the Other. Throughout the book, McGee gives us a way of melding our otherwise mutually exclusive critical approaches toward desire and history, by renewing our understanding of the politics of the subject, and the radical alterity we must learn to tell."<br/>--Jennifer Wicke,<br/>Modern Fiction Studies<br/><br/> About the Author <br/>Patrick McGee is currently Emeritus Professor from Louisiana State University. His most recent work is a long poem, <br/>Comedy<br/>, Book 1: <br/>Archival Resurrections<br/>. He lives in Seattle.