... Discourses (language and ideology) materialized the world-system, which is a feature of capitalism. Imperialism and colonialism produced aggregations of capital in the core by expropriating the resources and labor of the periphery. Europe thereby was a creation of the Third World insofar as...

... world-systems theory. The chapter formulates a materialist account of world literature from these resources. ...

..., Marx’s reductive view of global capitalism can be supplemented by world-systems theory. The chapter formulates a materialist account of world literature from these resources. ...

... The staged and stagy microworlds of murder mysteries resemble bureaucratic comedies. These stand-alone and repeatable artworks make the world of modern office work appear in the world. It makes a world of repeatable motions plausible. Agatha Christie’s novel, Appointment with Death , is a...

..., and the capitalist world-system. Marx, Freud, Lacan, Gramsci, Althusser, and Foucault challenged humanism’s sovereign subjects, and they suggested that subjects are constituted through discourse. ...

... This chapter takes up the crisis of the work of art in the epoch of social systems from another side.. The crisis of the art work now has become a way of posing the problem of action and intention in autotropic (self-turned) systems. The art work now resembles a practical joke: a staging...

... This part sets out the premises of the official world and describes the emergence of a self-reporting form of society: its cultural technologies and its aesthetic techniques. It defines the epoch of social systems and our indoor social life. The chapter shows how suspense becomes a world...