'In recent years the disciplines of literary studies and cultural studies have engaged in occasional hostilities but very rarely in productive engagement with each other’s methodologies. Yet each offers a set of rich resources for the other in a period of disciplinary crisis across the Humanities.
'The essays collected here, working at the point of intersection of these two fields, are centrally concerned with conflicts of value: the aesthetic value that is ascribed to texts; the economic value that accrues to intellectual property; the processes of social valuation that turn waste into worth and back again; the structures of valued knowledge that shape both the disciplines of knowledge and everyday life; and the political struggles over social and cultural difference that give rise, at their most intense, to the desolation of communities and the destruction of cultures.' (Publisher's blurb)
'Book titles are important, albeit troubling things. I have a particular ineptitude in proposing titles for my own books, in deciding on a word, a phrase or a clause that both captures the core contention of the book and also happens to be catchy and accessible to that frightening, intangible, crucial Other of writing practice, the reader. But this conundrum may be unique to the condition of the ‘creative writer’ who has, by the very mechanism of this condition, a rather fuzzy notion of the reader. For a more specialist, academic writer, the task seems somewhat easier: such a writer can enter an existing discourse – apropos of their academic specialty – with more surefootedness, and may, instead of aiming to seduce a fickle reader, simply express the central thesis of their work and be done with it.' (Introduction)
'Book titles are important, albeit troubling things. I have a particular ineptitude in proposing titles for my own books, in deciding on a word, a phrase or a clause that both captures the core contention of the book and also happens to be catchy and accessible to that frightening, intangible, crucial Other of writing practice, the reader. But this conundrum may be unique to the condition of the ‘creative writer’ who has, by the very mechanism of this condition, a rather fuzzy notion of the reader. For a more specialist, academic writer, the task seems somewhat easier: such a writer can enter an existing discourse – apropos of their academic specialty – with more surefootedness, and may, instead of aiming to seduce a fickle reader, simply express the central thesis of their work and be done with it.' (Introduction)
