Baudrillard: A Critical Reader

by Douglas Kellner (Editor)

This Critical Reader provides the first truly balanced assessment of Baudrillard's contributions to contemporary thought. The writers commissioned for this volume interrogate Baudrillard's positions in terms of specific topics, fields and debates - from his early work on the system of objects to his most recent metaphysical speculations on the fatality of the subject.Self-described intellectual terrorist Jean Baudrillard is one of the most important and provocative writers of the contemporary era. Widely acclaimed as the prophet of postmodernity, he has famously announced the disappearance of the subject, political economy, meaning, truth, the social, and the real in contemporary social formations. Replacing the most persistent modern orthodoxies with his own often novel formulations and arguments, Baudrillard's writings have generated enormous controversy, forcing readers to decide if his thought is progression or regression from established positions.

333 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Douglas Kellner is a "third generation" critical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kellner was an early theorist of the field of critical media literacy and has been a leading theorist of media culture generally.[citation needed] In his recent work, he has increasingly argued that media culture has become dominated by the forms of spectacle and mega-spectacle. He also has contributed important studies of alter-globalization processes, and has always been concerned with counter-hegemonic movements and alternative cultural expressions in the name of a more radically democratic society.

Kellner has written with a number of authors, including (with Steven Best) an award-winning trilogy of books on postmodern turns in philosophy, the arts, and in science and technology. More recently, he is known for his work exploring the politically oppositional potentials of new media and attempted to delineate what they term "multiple technoliteracies" as a movement away from the present attempt to standardize a corporatist form of computer literacy. Previously, Kellner served as the literary executor of the famed documentary film maker Emile de Antonio and is presently overseeing the publication of six volumes of the collected papers of the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. At present, Kellner is the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews

[J C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kellner knows his literature very well. Plus this was my main source of poetic justice against pure and utter stupidity. A lucid analysis.