Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time

A selection of Martin Jay’s recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter - and about why ideas matter. Borrowing from Flaubert’s notion of a dictionary of
received ideas
and Raymond Williams’s explorations of the
keywords
of the modern age, Jay investigates some of the central concepts by which we currently organize our thoughts and lives. His topics range from
theory
and
experience
to the meaning of
multiculturalism
and the dynamics of cultural
subversion.
Among the thinkers he engages are Bataille and Foucault, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Walter Benjamin, Christa Wolf, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

By looking closely at what
words do and perform,
Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. By helping to distance us from much that we now take for granted, he makes it difficult for us to remain comfortably certain about what we think we know.

Elegantly written and richly insightful, this is a work of cultural criticism and intellectual analysis of the first order.