Dilemmas of Enlightenment: Studies in the Rhetoric and Logic of Ideology

by Oscar Kenshur

Overview

Oscar Kenshur combines trenchant analyses of important early-modern texts with a powerful critique of postmodern theories of ideology. He thereby contributes both to our understanding of Enlightenment thought and to contemporary debates about cultural studies and critical theory.

While striving to resolve "dilemmas" occasioned by conflicting intellectual and political commitments, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers often relied upon ideas originally used by their enemies to support very different claims. Thus, they engaged in what Kenshur calls "intellectual co-optation." In exploring the ways in which Dryden, Bayle, Voltaire, Johnson, and others used this technique, Kenshur presents a historical landscape distinctly different from the one constructed by much contemporary theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520913462
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/22/2023
Series:	The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics , #26
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Oscar Kenshur is Professor of Comparative Literature and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and of English at Indiana University. He is the author of Open Form and the Shape of Ideas (1986).