Customer Reviews

Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock (Literature, Culture, Theory)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Cohen's work here is especially demanding - a very tricky style of writing, I think - but if you can get past that, the essays collected in this work pay you back. While far too many critical theories sabotage their own projects from the very beginning, leaping into ill-thought generalizations of identity or politics, Cohen is aiming for something much much larger than that. Recommended for textualists, deconstructors, and anyone unsatisfied with the disguised vacuity of today's critical scene. 5 stars for me!

This work is largely a collection of essays recast and less a unified and homogenized book. The vestiges of this compositional mode are somewhat obvious and expected: fairly large interstices between targets and times and yet significant redundancy of some materials, references, and concepts. Still, the book's central concerns, style, and thematics are consistent, interesting, and very intelligently developed. Further, Cohen's capacity to move between literary texts and the broad expanses of philosophy with equal invention and creativity is as rare as it is welcome. Oddly, I find the title a little misleading since "anti-mimesis" seems to be dialectical in a way at odds with a project that eschews binaries and symmetry and whose closer model might be the the "dialogic" of Voloshinov. As his later work perhaps reflects, I think this is moving more toward Lucretius, Spinoza and Deleuze than is evident here. Still, to be an important intervention in both materialism and American Literature is quite remarkable.

Tom Cohen is a professor at my University where I have had the pleasure of learning from him directly. He studied directly from Derrida while at Yale and for other reviewers to critique his style, form, etc. - one must realize that this man is extraordinary and to learn from an apprentice of Derrida is not only an honor but an unforgettable experience.

For those who cannot have that honor of learning from him directly I highly suggest reading his books.

The man who wrote this book has a large vocabulary and an amusingly facile grasp of critical issues. Take, for example, these sentences, which are typical: "Yet, as I said, there is something not only too pat but deeply evasive in the above narrative. Indeed, the scandal going into the 90s is not the conservativism of post-structuralism (a claim supplanting that of its "nihilism", which is only the short-hand used about those installing a different model of meaning from the perspective of those standing to be supplanted) but that of factions of the left and various anti-theory pragmatists. To begin with, the very accusation of "formalism" itself is one that has long concealed a potential repression." Etc. etc.

This screed is not criticism, it is polemic. If you are interested in literature or film as art, you are best advised to avoid this book.

Actually, this book may be an extremely progressive form of novel, in which case it is a priceless work of art. But as criticism, I suggest its author lay off the bong and get down to serious business.