Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Deferrals, Punctuations, Media Textualities 1
1. How "Popular" Music Thinks the Political 27
2. Urban Punctuations: Symphonic and Dialectic 55
3. Architectural Punctuations: The Politics of "Event Spaces"
84
4. Image Punctuations: From the Photographic to the Cinematic
115
5. Holocaust Punctuations: Handke, Kertesz, and Sebald 148
Notes 175
Index 209
Michael J. Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and the author of numerous books, most recently, The Political Sublime, also published by Duke University Press.
"We tend to think of punctuation-if we think of it at all-as an
invisible tool of grammar and writing, a silent orderer with no
content or meaning of its own. In Punctuations, Michael
Shapiro radically upends that way of thinking. In an exquisitely
nuanced and thoughtful reading, Shapiro shows how
punctuation-broadly conceived-gives us over to another politics,
one that is marked by unresolvedness and contingency rather than
determination and order. In this book, voids, interruptions, and
other mechanisms of intratextual resistance demand and receive our
full attention with critical implications not only for the habits
of reading but of how we live in and occupy the world around us."
-- James R. Martel, author of * The Misinterpellated Subject *
"Punctuations offers a distinctly new critical intervention
by fleshing out the political and methodological significance of
punctuation. Drawing on a broad range of influences from critical
theory, the arts, and literature, Michael J. Shapiro gives the
reader myriad alternative ways to develop new angles of vision, all
of which ultimately ask how we might develop better forms of
resistance to the present. I wouldn't have expected anything less
from Shapiro, who continues to surprise and push forward the limits
others place around the meaning of critical scholarship." -- Brad
Evans, coauthor of * Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence
in the Age of Spectacle *
"Shapiro threads the needle effectively between different texts,
different genres, different scholars' voices, and his own past
readings to show us how 'alternative, nondogmatic communities of
sense' are created through re-punctuations." -- Katherine Goktepe *
Perspectives on Politics *
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