“Michaels has written a bracing polemic that should quicken the debate over what diversity really means, or should mean, in academia and beyond.”—The New York Review of BooksIf there’s one thing Ameri
The Shape of the Signifier is a critique of recent theory--primarily literary but also cultural and political. Bringing together previously unconnected strands of Michaels's thought--from "Against The
A"A withering examination of how the celebration of cultural and ethnic difference obscures our yawning economic divide . . . This is a refreshing, angry, and important book.A" A--The Atl
"Michaels has written a book that will be essential reading for all those interested in American fiction and American culture. . . . This is a daring, brash work of the best kind--it will be much disc
Bertolt Brecht once worried that our sympathy for the victims of a social problem can make the problem’s “beauty and attraction” invisible. InThe Beauty of a Social Problem, Walter Benn Michaels explo
Bertolt Brecht once worried that our sympathy for the victims of a social problem can make the problem’s “beauty and attraction” invisible. In The Beauty of a Social Problem, Walter Benn Michaels
The term American Renaissance designates a period in our nation's history when the literary "classics" appeared—works "original" enough to mark a beginning for America's literary history. But the Ame
Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea
