Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France - Tapa dura

"It seldom happens that a book gives one exactly what one hungers for. This book does. It is remarkable both for its fine-tuned sense of the historical period and for its stunning synthesis of major theoretical discourses." -- Barbara E. Johnson, Harvard University "Discourse/Counter-Discourse is an extremely intelligent, even brilliant, treatment of an impressive range of important problems in literary theory and literary history. It is imaginatively conceived and provocatively executed." -- Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University "An excellent example of a kind of literary history that is possible under the aegis of recent theories of the sign when linked with the social analyses of thinkers such as Foucault, Gramsci, and Bourdieu.... The result is a coherent theory of texts and social contexts which diminishes the role of neither and an impressive application that demonstrates a complex interanimation between the discourses of the nineteenth-century French mass media and the more 'literary' works of Balzac, Flaubert, Daumier, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Marx." * Virginia Quarterly Review *

Discourse/Counter-Discourse is situated on the border between cultural history and literary criticism: combining the insights of Marxism and semiotics, it attempts to delineate the cultural function of texts. Focusing on France during a period of remarkable cultural, social, and political transformation, Richard Terdiman examines both the dominant bourgeois discourse-novels, newspapers, and other mass forms of expression-and the effort of intellectuals to devise counter-discourses to combat it.