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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Myths of the Modern -- 1 Modernity and Feminism -- 2 On Nostalgia: The Prehistoric Woman -- 3 Imagined Pleasures: The Erotics and Aesthetics of Consumption -- 4 Masking Masculinity: The Feminization of Writing -- 5 Love, God, and the Orient: Reading the Popular Sublime -- 6 Visions of the New: Feminist Discourses of Evolution and Revolution -- 7 The Art of Perversion: Female Sadists and Male Cyborgs -- Afterword: Rewriting the Modern -- Notes -- Index

Contemporary theory is full of references to the modern and the postmodern. How useful are these terms? What exactly do they mean? And how is our sense of these terms changing under the pressure of feminist analysis? In Doing Time, Rita Felski argues that it makes little sense to think of the modern and postmodern as opposing or antithetical terms. Rather, we need a historical perspective that is attuned to cultural and political differences within the same time as well as the leaky boundaries between different times. Neither the modern nor the postmodern are unified, coherent, or self-evident realities. Drawing on cultural studies and critical theory, Felski examines a range of themes central to debates about postmodern culture, including changing meanings of class, the end of history, the status of art and aesthetics, postmodernism as "the end of sex," and the politics of popular culture. Placing women at the center of analysis, she suggests, has a profound impact on the way we thing about historical periods. As a result, feminist theory is helping to reshape our vision of both the modern and the postmodern

Tradução do artigo de Rita Felski "The role of aesthetics in cultural studies" por Joana d'Arc Martins Pupo.

Auf der Basis einer Besprechung von fünf Büchern vertritt die Autorin die These, dass "die Moderne mit Macht zurückkehrt". Was diese Bücher verbindet, ist der Umstand, dass sie die bestehenden Konzepte der Moderne unterlaufen, wie sie von verschiedenen Disziplinen definiert werden: als unabgeschlossenes philosophisches Projekt, als globales soziökonomisches System oder als eine Reihe von experimentellen Stilen in der Kunst. Die Moderne wird dabei im Rahmen der cultural studies neu überdacht, weil dieser Ansatz ein starkes Interesse auch für Populärkultur und Alltagsleben zeigt. Die Autorin diskutiert die folgenden fünf Thesen zur Revision der Moderne: (1) Die Moderne ist nicht gleichbedeutend mit Nivellierung. (2) Die Entrechteten sind nicht bloß Opfer oder Außenseiter der Moderne. (3) Die Moderne läßt die handelnden Subjekte nicht verschwinden. (4) Die Moderne ist nicht synonym mit Neuen. (5) Die Moderne ist keine selbstverständliche Idee. (ICA2)

A review article on a book edited by Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989 [see listing in IRPS No. 67]). This collection of essays by US philosophers & social scientists examines the relationship between postmodernism & feminism. The volume attempts to determine the extent to which the postmodern critique of reason, history, & the subject is in conflict, or accord, with the feminist tradition. In one essay, Nancy Fraser & Linda Nicholson criticize postmodernists for elaborating antifoundational metaphilosophical perspectives, while covering up their own reliance on the very intellectual traditions they seek to undermine. Others explore the history of feminism, liberatory politics, & the politics of difference & sexual identity. The book is praised as a valuable contribution to feminist thought, but criticized for glossing over the sociohistorical & theoretical dimensions of postmodernism. 10 References. W. Howard