Phantom Communities reconsiders the status of the simulacrum-sometimes defined as a copy of a copy, but more rigorously defined as a copy that subverts the legitimacy and authority of its model-in light of recent debates in literature, art, philosophy, and cultural studies.The author pursues two interwoven levels of analysis. On one level, he explores the poetics of the simulacrum, considered as a form that internalizes repetition, through close readings of a number of exemplary literary texts, paintings, and films from both the Anglo-American and French traditions, including works by Jean Genet, Pierre Klossowski, Rene Magritte, Andy Warhol, J. G. Ballard, Balthus, and Raul Ruiz. Through his readings of these works, the author follows the transformations of the simulacrum, showing how its vicissitudes provide an optic for remapping the postmodern canon.On another level, the author offers an account of the role played by the simulacrum as a theoretical concept that assumes varying analytical and ideological valences in the writings of such theorists as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In so doing, Phantom Communities intervenes in ongoing interdisciplinary debates concerning the historical and ideological limits of postmodernism, as well as the utopian possibilities of art, literature, and philosophy in a postmodern context.Moving between these debates and the interpretation of individual works, the author shows how they converge on the fundamental aesthetic and ideological problem raised by the postmodern culture of the simulacrum: imagining the virtual communities that, at the margins of postmodern culture, are at once figured and eclipsed by its proliferating images.

About the Author
Scott Durham is Assistant Professor of French at Northwestern University.

Reviews
"Phantom Communities develops its arguments with a razor's edge, and it has the gift of embracing ambivalence, contradiction, undecidability, and other forces with an uncommon sense of affirmation. This book will mark an enduring contribution to French studies in America." -Tom Conley,Harvard University



Book Information
ISBN 9780804733366
Author Scott Durham
Format Paperback
Page Count 270
Imprint Stanford University Press
Publisher Stanford University Press
Weight(grams) 363g