Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

post what?! (not) an abbreviated introduction 39
tural Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993); Meenkshi Durham and
Douglas Kellner, eds., Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2001). For those interested in learning more about the main theorists
and debates concerning the relationship between postmodernism and
poststructuralism, see Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the “Unfi
nished Project of Modernity” (London: Athlone, 2000); Steven Best and
Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Investigations (New York:
Guilford, 1991).
12. Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be (San
Francisco: Harper, 1990).
13. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan
P, 1994).
14. Marshall Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air (New York:
Simon, 1982).
15. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference
(London: Routledge, 1989) xi–xii. For a quick defi nition of essentialism, see
Brian Cliff’s description on the Emory University’s English Department Web
site from spring 1996 .
16. David Guralink, ed., Webster’s New World Dictionary (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1980) 656.
17. We should also point out that the term hermeneutic has had different
meanings in various intellectual traditions. In twentieth-century
continental philosophy, it has had semiotic overtones in what has come
to be identifi ed as phenomenology. According to this school of thought,
a “hermeneut,” the reader or interpreter of a text, is always recognized as
being historically situated; thus, “no matter how ‘close’ she claims to be
to identifying the conditions of its [the text’s] production, [she] will always
be mediated by [. . .] historically constructed assumptions and expectations.”
Clive Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader (New York:
Routledge, 2000) 65. Throughout this text, the version of hermeneutics
that we employ emerged from literature classrooms, where it meant the
search for the author’s original intentions as the litmus test for authentic,
original, accurate, and, above all, good literary analysis. It is for this reason
that we will use the terms hermeneutic and modern more or less interchangeably.
18. Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).
19. Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow: Progress,
1972) 120.
20. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
21. “Death of the Author” was originally published in 1968 but appeared
in translation in English for the fi rst time in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-
Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977).
22. Butler, Postmodernism 28.
23. Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1983) 34.