Frida Beckman

How is sexual pleasure inscribed into conceptions of the body, gender, health and the human? What is its role in the construction of these notions? And, most importantly, how can it contribute to an expansion of what they mean? Intervening into fields including posthumanist, disability, animal and feminist studies, and current critiques of capitalism and consumerism, Frida Beckman addresses these questions to recover a theory of sexuality from Deleuze's work.

Kan något gott komma ur postmodernismen?På senare år har begreppet postmodernism blivit ett slagträ i debatten om allt från identitetspolitik och sanningsrelativism, skola, vård och vårdköer, konst och konspirationsteorier.Litteraturvetaren Frida Beckman reder ut missförstånden som omgärdar begreppet och menar att vi faktiskt har en del att lära av de postmoderna frågeställningarna – inte minst eftersom de förvarnade om, snarare än skapade, den tid vi lever i nu.

Why does it seem like our everyday life is shadowed by something menacing? This book identifies and illuminates paranoia as a significant feature of contemporary American society and culture. Centering on what it identifies as three key dimensions – power, truth, and identity – in three different contexts – society, literature, and critique – the book explores and explains the increasing influence of paranoid thinking in American society during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first, a period that has seen the rise of control systems and neoliberal ascendency. Inquiring about the predominance of white, male, American subjects in paranoid culture, Frida Beckman recognizes the antagonistic maintenance and fortification of a conception of the autonomous individual that perceives itself to be under threat. Identifying such paranoia as emerging from an increasingly disjunctive relation between this conception of the subject and the changing nature of the public sphere, she develops the concept of the paranoid chronotope as a tool for the theoretical analysis of social, literary, and critical practices today. Investigating twenty-first century paranoid fictions, New Sincerity novels, conspiracist online culture, and postcritique, Beckman shows how the paranoid chronotope constitutes a recurring feature of modern consciousness.

Why does it seem like our everyday life is shadowed by something menacing? This book identifies and illuminates paranoia as a significant feature of contemporary American society and culture. Centering on what it identifies as three key dimensions – power, truth, and identity – in three different contexts – society, literature, and critique – the book explores and explains the increasing influence of paranoid thinking in American society during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first, a period that has seen the rise of control systems and neoliberal ascendency. Inquiring about the predominance of white, male, American subjects in paranoid culture, Frida Beckman recognizes the antagonistic maintenance and fortification of a conception of the autonomous individual that perceives itself to be under threat. Identifying such paranoia as emerging from an increasingly disjunctive relation between this conception of the subject and the changing nature of the public sphere, she develops the concept of the paranoid chronotope as a tool for the theoretical analysis of social, literary, and critical practices today. Investigating twenty-first century paranoid fictions, New Sincerity novels, conspiracist online culture, and postcritique, Beckman shows how the paranoid chronotope constitutes a recurring feature of modern consciousness.

Hur går det till att analysera litterära verk? Vilka är de grundläggande teorierna och termerna? Vilka grepp finns för att genomlysa idéer, personbeskrivningar och konstnärliga verknings­medel i litterära verk? Litteraturvetenskap I är en introduktion till olika teorier och metoder inom området och ger också en kort skiss av litteraturvetenskapens utveckling. Boken består av elva kapitel, skrivna av erfarna lärare och forskare. Syftet är att ge en orientering om litteraturvetenskapens tankevärld - men också att ge läsarna praktiska råd inför arbetet med litterära verk.Kapitlen behandlar analys av fiktionsprosa, lyrik och dramatik, litteraturhistorieskrivning, perspektiv på äldre litteratur och idéanalys. Särskilda kapitel ägnas också analysen av makt och genus, barnlitteratur, världslitteratur, litteratursociologi och frågor om litterärt värde. Litteraturvetenskap I vänder sig främst till studenter på grundläggande nivå i litteraturvetenskap och lärarutbildningens litteraturkurser. Syskonvolymen Litteraturvetenskap II är avsedd för studenter på avancerad nivå.

Gilles Deleuze, the person and philosopher, was both singular and multifaceted. Frida Beckman traces Deleuze’s remarkable intellectual journey, mapping the encounters from which his life and work emerged. She considers how his life and philosophical developments resonate with historical, political and philosophical events, from the Second World War to the student uprisings in the 1960s, the opening of the experimental University of Paris VIII and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Although less of a public figure than many of his contemporaries, Deleuze’s life and philosophy are bound up with his numerous friendships, collaborations and disputes with several of the period’s most influential thinkers, as well as his connections with writers, artists and film scholars.Beckman considers the events, moods and intensities that were generated by this multiplicity of encounters throughout his life. The book follows Deleuze from the salons to which he was invited as a young student through his popularity as a young teacher to the development of the rich phases of his philosophical work. While resisting the idea of ‘Deleuzians’, the book also reviews a post-Deleuzian legacy and the influence of this extraordinary thinker on contemporary philosophy.

When “revolution” becomes a recurring theme in mainstream culture, where do we look for the tools for a critical engagement with the present? Addressing the link between allegory and cultural critique in contemporary culture and resisting the thematic abstraction of sexy, fast, revolutionary content, this book suggests that one way is to pay attention not so much to content as to form. Culture Control Critique provides an analysis of how representations of political systems in contemporary mainstream culture may be understood not so much by looking at their apparent critical message but by shifting our critical gaze to an underlying and recurring political logic that controls the desire for political change.

When “revolution” becomes a recurring theme in mainstream culture, where do we look for the tools for a critical engagement with the present? Addressing the link between allegory and cultural critique in contemporary culture and resisting the thematic abstraction of sexy, fast, revolutionary content, this book suggests that one way is to pay attention not so much to content as to form. Culture Control Critique provides an analysis of how representations of political systems in contemporary mainstream culture may be understood not so much by looking at their apparent critical message but by shifting our critical gaze to an underlying and recurring political logic that controls the desire for political change.

This title forms a theory of sexuality from Deleuze's philosophy that is all too relevant to today's world. Intervening into fields including posthumanist, disability, animal and feminist studies, and current critiques of capitalism and consumerism, Frida Beckman explores the possibility of recovering a theory of sexuality from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's work. She makes a definitive contribution to cultural, conceptual and political debates about sexuality. It looks at Deleuze's writing on sexuality from both historical and conceptual perspectives to show how he interacts with other thinkers and sexuality in practice. It compares Deleuze's sexual theories to those of Michel Foucault - one of the most influential theorists of sexuality in Continental philosophy and critical theory - analysing the differences, similarities and interrelations.