Michel De Certeau: Analysing Culture

Description:
This is a new and comprehensive survey of the life and work of this leading cultural theorist. Michel de Certeau is becoming increasingly recognised as a cultural theorist whose methodologies could rival those of Foucault. His seminal work, 'The Practice of Everyday Life', is now one of the most cited works in Sociology, Geography and Cultural Studies. In this engaging book, Ben Highmore provides a stimulating account of Michel de Certeau's work and its relation to the field of cultural studies. The book explores those aspects of de Certeau's work that both challenge and re-imagine cultural studies, highlighting the potential this work has for supplying a critical epistemology and a practical ethics for the study of culture within the arts and humanities more generally. By tracing insistent themes across the corpus of de Certeau's writing, the book engages with questions of ethnography, cultural policy, and the psychoanalysis of culture, and brings his writing into productive contact with a range of contexts that are both local (French intellectual and social history) and global (Anglophone cultural studies, Subaltern Studies, Post-colonialism). 'Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture' provides an ideal introduction to the work of this extraordinary and important thinker.

Table of Contents:
Preface and acknowledgements; 1. Ways of Operating: Introducing Michel de Certeau's Methodological Imagination; 2. An Epistemological Awakening: History and Writing; 3. The Oceanic Rumble of the Ordinary: Psychoanalysis and Culture; 4. Zones of Silence: Orality, Archives, and Resistance; 5. The Zoo of Everyday Practices: Literature, Narratives, Voices; 6. An Art of Diversion: Cultural Policy and the Counter Public Sphere; 7. Cultural Studies: A Practitioner's Art.

Author Biography:
Ben Highmore is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol.