Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology, Paperback

Description

The purpose of art, according to the artist Banksy, is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. The purpose of that creative practice called "theory" is to disturb everyone-to perpetually unsettle all our staid assumptions, all our fixed understandings, all our familiar identities. An alternative to the typically large and unwieldy theory anthology, Adventures in Theory offers a manageably short collection of writings that have famously enacted the central purpose of theory.

Adventures in Theory takes readers on a steadily unsettling tour, spanning the most significant thought provocations in the history of theoretical writing from Marx and Nietzsche through Foucault and Derrida to Butler, Zizek, and Edelman. Engagingly lean and enjoyably mean, this is a minimalist anthology with maximal impact.

About the author

Calvin Thomas is Professor of English at Georgia State University, USA. He is the author of Ten Lessons in Theory (Bloomsbury, 2013), Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory (2008), and Male Matters (1996). He is the editor of Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (2000).