Bøker i Cultural Dialectics-serien

In this candid and concise volume, Kyle Conway, author of The Art of Communication in a Polarized World, considers how we can open ourselves to others and to ideas that scare us by reading difficult texts. Conway argues that because we resist ideas we don‿t understand, we must embrace confusion as a constitutive part of understanding and meaningful exchange, whether between a reader and a text or between two people. Building on the work of hermeneutics scholar Paul Ricoeur, Conway evaluates the recurring paradox of miscommunication that results in deeper understanding and proposes strategies for reading that will allow individuals give up the illusion of certainty. In elegant and compelling prose, Conway introduces readers to the idea that it is through uncertainty that we can gain access to new and meaningful worlds‿those of texts and other people.

In this sequence of essays, Ian Angus engages with themes of identity, power, and the nation as they emerge in contemporary English Canadianphilosophical thought, seeking to prepare the groundwork for a criticaltheory of neoliberal globalization. The essays are organized into threeparts. The opening part offers a nuanced critique of the Hegelianconfidence and progressivism that has come to dominate Canadianintellectual life. Through an analysis of the work of several prominentCanadian thinkers, among them Charles Taylor and C. B. Macpherson, Angus suggests that Hegelian frames of reference are inadequate, failing as they do to accommodate the fact of English Canada'scontinuing indebtedness to empire. The second part focuses on nationalidentity and political culture, including the role of Canadian studiesas a discipline, adapting its critical method to Canadian politicalculture. The first two parts culminate in the positive articulation, inPart 3, of author's own conception, one that is at once moreutopian and more tragic than that of the first two parts. Here, Angusdevelops the concept of locative thought--the thinking of a peoplewho have undergone dispossession, "of a people seeking its placeand therefore of a people that has not yet found its place."

The totalizing scope of the combined effects of computerization and the worldwide network are the subject of the essays in The Digital Nexus, a volume that responds to McLuhan's request for a "special study" of the tsunami-like transformation of the communication landscape.

A collection of essays on interdisciplinary theory, research, and teaching.

Making Game is a mixed-genre composition in which the author reflects on the philosophical and ethical implications of hunting wild game.

In Northern Love, Paul Nonnekes pursues debates in psychoanalysis and cultural theory in pursuit of a distinctive conception of a Canadian masculinity.