A William V. Spanos Reader

The critic William V. Spanos, a pioneer of postmodern theory, is everything that current post-modern theory is accused of not being: polemical, engaged, prophetic, passionate. A William V. Spanos Reader collects Spanos’s most important critical essays, providing both an introduction to his work and a provocation to the practice of humanistic criticism.

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The American critic William V. Spanos, a pioneer of postmodern theory and co-founder of one of its principal organs, the journal boundary 2, is, in the words of A William V. Spanos Reader coeditor Daniel T. O’Hara, everything that current post-modern theory is accused of not being: polemical, engaged, prophetic, passionate. Informed by his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Spanos saw dire con-sequences for life in modernist aesthetic experiments, and he thereafter imbued his work with a constructive aspect ever in the name of more life. A William V. Spanos Reader collects Spanos’s most important critical essays, providing both an introduction to his prophetic, visionary work and a provocation to the practice of humanistic criticism.