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    Normative Imaginaries (review)
    Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 17 (1): 147-152. 2017.
    Olympe de Gouges is known primarily for La Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791), which is her response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, adopted in 1789 by the National Assembly. Carol Sherman's book, Reading Olympe de Gouges, turns our attention away from normative principles of La Déclaration and directs it toward the ways that de Gouges's other texts challenge the normativity of the dominant social imaginaries of the time. Sherman’s book is required reading for …Read more
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    Ontologie linguistique et dialogue politique chez Bakhtine, in Bakhtine et la pensée dialogique
    In Bakhtine et la pensée dialogique, Mestengo Press. pp. 23-31. 2005.
  •  129
    Discursive Incarceration: Black Fragility in a Divided Public Sphere
    Jam It! Journal of American Studies in Italy 7. 2022.
    The expression of fragility has always been a difficult and complex matter for African Americans, for the discourse of mainstream media is set up to sustain their fragility while at the same time misrecognizing it. Even though the black public sphere split off from the dominant public sphere after the Civil War to enable distinctive forms of expression, the “practiced habits” of which Coates speaks continued in the structures of the dominant discourse. My essay will analyze the structure of Amer…Read more
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    Introduction
    Intertexts 7 (2): 111-115. 2003.
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    While most studies of reference focus on the relationship of the individual proposition to the world, this book looks at the problem of reference through the holistic lens of the practices and assumptions that inform the construction of literary worlds. Beginning with Balzac’s arguments for establishing his version of realism, Realism and the Drama of Reference then moves to Flaubert’s challenge to those realist norms and assumptions in its depiction of setting, narration, dialogue, and characte…Read more
  •  1
    Critical Confrontations: Literary Theories in Dialogue
    University of South Carolina Press. 1997.
    While most theory books treat theorists and schools through isolated encyclopedia entries or self-contained chapters, Critical Confrontations brings theories into dialogue so that their differences, commonalities, and possibilities can be assessed. Each chapter builds upon the preceding one so that the reader can follow a continuous dialogue with what has come before. The book includes discussions of Gadamer, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Bakhtin, Butler, Habermas, West, and Said as well as lite…Read more
  •  137
    Debates in feminist political philosophy often focus on what problematic(s) to use in order to understand normative ideals, gendered differences, and their histories. For the purposes of this chapter, I will contrast two important problematics in these debates, the procedural/deliberative politics in the tradition of Critical Theory, represented here by Seyla Benhabib, and the poststructuralist or postmodern politics, represented here by Judith Butler. The goal of the contrast will be to set up …Read more
  •  618
    Theorizing Textual Subjects: Agency and Oppression
    Cambridge University Press. 1997.
    This book addresses a central dilemma in critical theory today: how to theorize the subject as both a construct of oppressive discourse and as a dialogical agent. By engaging a wide range of leading philosophical and critical thinkers—James, Habermas, MacIntyre, Rorty, Taylor, Derrida and West are all critiqued—Meili Steele proposes linking language with human agency in order to develop an alternative textual and ethical theory of the subject. Developing this theory through readings that address…Read more
  •  124
    The Philosophical Importance of Henry James's Late Style
    Henry James Review 35 (3): 209-217. 2014.
    When speaking of the philosophical importance of James’s late style, critics and philosophers have taken two broad approaches. One route, exemplified by Martha Nussbaum, attributes this style to the sensitivity of the characters. The other, exemplified by Robert Pippin, attributes the writing’s complexity to the ambiguities of the moral codes during this period of history. In my reading, James’s texts address a more general problem of modernity, which is the flattening of the lifeworld (Lebenswe…Read more
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    Social imaginaries and the theory of the normative utterance
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 43 (10): 1045-1071. 2017.
    From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political theories in developing their basic normative concepts and principles, providing an alternative to the oscillation between the constructivism and the realism. Theorists of the imaginary have enabled us to think …Read more
  •  204
    Three Problematics of Linguistic Vulnerability: Gadamer, Benhabib, and Butler"
    In Lorraine Code (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 335-366. 2003.
    Debates in feminist political philosophy often focus on what problematic(s) to use in order to understand normative ideals, gendered differences, and their histories. For the purposes of this chapter, I will contrast two important problematics in these debates, the procedural/deliberative politics in the tradition of Critical Theory, represented here by Seyla Benhabib, and the poststructuralist or postmodern politics, represented here by Judith Butler. The goal of the contrast will be to set up …Read more
  •  16
    Letteratura, filosofia e la politica dell'immaginario sociale
    Iride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 23 (1): 111-124. 2010.
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    World Disclosure and Normativity: The Social Imaginary as the Space of Argument
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 174 (Spring): 171-190. 2016.
    Abstract: There has been an ongoing dispute between defenders of world disclosure (understood here in a loosely Heideggerian sense) and advocates of normative debate. I will take up a recent confrontation between Charles Taylor and Robert Brandom over this question as my point of departure for showing how world disclosure can expand the range of normative argument. I begin by distinguishing pre-reflective disclosure—the already interpreted, structured world in which we find ourselves—from reflec…Read more
  •  7
    After criticizing, Habermas's and Rawls's approaches to public reason,this book proposes social imaginaries, rather than constructed concepts, as the normative resource of public reasoning. Examples are drawn from debates over the display of the Confederate Flag, Ralph Ellison's exchange with Hannah Arendt over school desegregation, the controversy over Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, and arguments over "the clash of civilizations."
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    Ricoeur versus Taylor on Language and Narrative
    Metaphilosophy 34 (4): 425-446. 2003.
    Although Ricoeur and Taylor are often grouped together, their conceptions of language, literature, and practical reason are very different. The first half of this essay focuses on Ricoeur's theory of triple mimesis and narrative, showing how his attempt to synthesize Kant, Husserl, and structuralism results in a formalism that blocks out the ontological, hermeneutical, and historical dimensions of literature and practical reason. The second half of the essay develops Taylor's ontological concept…Read more