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The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the New Humanities
Author(s): Jeffrey T. Nealon (Author), Susan Searls Giroux (Author)
- Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
- Publication Date: August 18, 2003
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 232 pages
- ISBN-10: 0742519945
- ISBN-13: 9780742519947
Book Description
This text involves students in understanding and using the ‘tools’ of critical social and literary theory from the first day of class. It is an ideal first introduction before students encounter more difficult readings from critical and postmodern perspectives. Nealon and Giroux describe key concepts and illuminate each with an engaging inquiry that asks students to consider deeper and deeper questions. Written in students’ own idiom, and drawing its examples from the social world, literature, popular culture, and advertising, The Theory Toolbox offers students the language and opportunity to theorize rather than positioning them to respond to theory as a reified history of various schools of thought. Clear and engaging, it avoids facile description, inviting students to struggle with ideas and the world by virtue of the book’s relentless challenge to common assumptions and its appeal to common sense.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Always readable, often funny, and frequently profound, Nealon and Giroux tackle the most difficult and timely topics in theory with aplomb. An entire education in one tidy package. Students will find it invaluable, and advanced scholars will read it under the covers at night. (McGowan, John)
From their opening engagement with the punk song ‘Why Theory?,’ Nealon and Searls Giroux perform an impassioned and compelling argument for the productive work of theory as a crucial social action. As the title suggests,
The Theory Toolbox, instead of simply reviewing schools of theory and criticism, aims to help students figure out what they can do with theoretical concepts as tools for living. Organized to provide a productive immersion in key concepts such as agency and ideology, The Theory Toolbox engenders pragmatic encounters with theorists from Nietzsche to Deleuze. Through pertinent political and social examples, Nealon and Searls Giroux succeed in demonstrating why theory matters and, most remarkably, why postmodern theory matters in everyday life. In succeeding, they make a critical intervention in undergraduate education and in wider debates over theory and practice. This book should be required reading for all students desiring to become thinking citizens. (Kevin DeLuca) The Theory Toolbox is original and unusual, breaking the standard mold of social theory textbooks. It puts itself in the young theory student’s shoes and imagines what s/he needs to know, and how best to convey difficult material. A distinctive feature of this book is its interdisciplinarity, borrowing concepts from humanities disciplines in order to enrich social and sociological theory. My theory students will definitely need this path-breaking book in their toolboxes. (Ben Agger, University of Texas, Arlington)About the Author
Jeffrey T. Nealon teaches in the English department at Penn State University. He is author of several ‘theory’ books: Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction(1993), Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity(1998), and the co-edited collection Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique (2002). Susan Searls Giroux has a joint appointment in the English department and the College of Education at Penn State University. She is co-author, with Henry A. Giroux, of Selling Out Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Politics (2004) and co-editor of the Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies.
