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"What is the role of literature in the formation of the state? Anthony J. Cascardi takes up this fundamental question in Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics, a comprehensive analysis of the presence of politics in Don Quixote. Cascardi argues that when public speech is constrained, as it was in seventeenth-century Spain, politics must be addressed indirectly, including through comedy, myth, and travellers' tales. Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics convincingly reengages the ancient roots of political theory in modern literature by situating Cervantes within a long line of political thinkers. Cascardi notably connects Cervantes' political theory to Plato's, much as the writer's literary criticism has been firmly linked to Aristotle's. He also shows how Cervantes' view of literature provided a compelling alternative to the modern, scientific politics of Machiavelli and Hobbes, highlighting the potential interplay of literature and politics in an ideal state."--P. [i]

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues against the view that postmodern culture has rejected Enlightenment beliefs and explores instead the continuities contemporary theory shares with Kant's failed ambition to bring the project of Enlightenment to completion. He explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Wittgenstein in order to reverse the tendency to see works of art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which they are situated

This essay takes the challenges posed by a definition of the baroque as model for thinking about the ways in which problems in aesthetic history can shape a philosophy of culture. Attempts to define the baroque as a period within art history have led to an astounding degree of confusion. The search for unifying stylistic markers amid this confusion has led critics to seek deep structures, while historical analyses of the deep structures fail to sustain their connections to style or form. Using the baroque as a model, this essay looks at examples from the visual arts & architecture in order to demonstrate the ways in which deep-structure theories of culture falter by presupposing a more rigid distinction between surface & depth than may be the case. Drawing in part on Deleuze's notion of the fold, this essay proposes that we look at culture as driven by forces that are both materialized in surfaces that are themselves part of any "deep structure.". 10 Figures, 39 References. Adapted from the source document.