William V. Spanos

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William V. Spanos is a Heideggerian literary critic. Spanos is a Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York; he is a founder and editor of the critical journal boundary 2. His work draws heavily on the philosophical legacy of Martin Heidegger, and while it does show the influence of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Spanos's vocabulary and concepts remain closer to Heidegger's Destruktion ("destruction") of metaphysics than to its philosophical successors.

He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1964.

Spanos takes a post-modern approach to the West, globalization, colonization, and general interventionist foreign policy. He talks about a problem/solution mindset that America was in during Vietnam War, and how all foreign policy now is still stuck in this framework. Spanos' work derives from philosophers ranging from Heidegger and Nietzsche to Foucault.

1 Selected works
- 1.1 Books
- 1.2 Papers
2 External links

[edit] Selected works

[edit] Books

Repetitions: the Postmodern Occasion in Literature and Culture, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987
The End of Education: Toward Postshumanism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993
The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Cold War, the Canon, and the Struggle for American Literary Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995
America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire, University of Minnesota Press, 1999

[edit] Papers

Heidegger's Parmenides: Greek Modernity and the Classical Legacy, in Modern Greek Studies
Heidegger, Nazism, and the Repressive Hypothesis: The American Appropriation of the Question, in Boundary 2, vol. 17, 1990
Althusser's 'Problematic' in the Context of the Vietnam War: Towards a Spectral Politics, in Rethinking Marxism, vol. 10, no. 3, 1998
Rethinking the Postmodernity of the Discourse of Postmodernism, in International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice ed. Hans Bertens and Douwwe Fokkema (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1997)