Mass Mediauras: Essays on Form, Technics and Media - Tapa dura

"There are many works dealing with the critical and cultural themes and texts examined here, and also several recent expositions of deconstruction. I doubt, however, that there is another work dealing with these topics and issues, either together or individually, that can equal this one for its combined intellectual authority, conceptual subtlety, and literary elegance."-Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Duke University.

The essays and interviews that compose this book provide an excellent introduction to and overview of the thought of one of the most brilliant critical and cultural theorists of our day. They include Weber's readings of some of the central texts of critical theory - including Kant's Critique of Judgment, Heidegger's Questing after Technology, and Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility. Other essays examine the thought of Plato, Descartes, Husserl, Kafka, Joyce, and Derrida discussing questions of objectivity, translation, iterability, representation, and mass media. The essays are supplemented by interviews and discussions that range over such topics as the effects of film and television on the perception of reality, differences in reporting the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, problems of authority and authorship, the controversies over Paul de Man's wartime writings and Heidegger's political positions, the relation of the Frankfurt School to deconstruction, and generally the status of critical 'theory'.