Michael Gardiner
Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives
Boredom Studies is an increasingly rich and vital area of contemporary research that examines the experience of boredom as an importan – even quintessential – condition of modern life. This anthology of newly commissioned essays focuses on the historical and theoretical potential of this modern condition, connecting boredom studies with parallel discourses such as affect theory and highlighting possible avenues of future research. Spanning sociology, history, art, philosophy and cultural studies, the book considers boredom as a mass response to the atrophy of experience characteristic of a highly mechanised and urbanised social life. 2017, Routledge.
The Dialogics of Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology
As interest in the work of Bakhtin grows there is an increasing demand for a well organized, readable text which explains his main ideas and relates them to current social and cultural theory. This book is designed to supply this demand. Elegantly written with the needs of the student coming to Bakhtin for the first time in mind, it provides the essential guide to this important and neglected thinker. 2014, Routledge.
Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism
This volume explores the connection between two phenomena usually thought to be utterly incongruous, even antithetical: ‘utopia’ and ‘everyday life’. It presents a series of essays, written over the last twenty years, which rethink the nature and prospects of utopianism in a world that has grown increasingly sceptical as to the possibility of systemic socio-political transformation in a positive direction. Through critical interdisciplinary engagements with a wide variety of thinkers ranging from Mikhail Bakhtin to Henri Lefebvre and beyond, many of whom are often read as anti-utopian figures, the essays argue that it is possible to locate utopian promises buried deep within the embodied rituals, practices and symbolic forms associated with everyday existence, in a manner that reveals the essential openness of the present day to momentous future change. 2013, Peter Lang.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Masters of Modern Social Thought series, four vols.
This timely and comprehensive collection covers the contribution and significance of the famed Russian social and cultural theorist, Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895-1975), as well as the work of other central members of the so-called 'Bakhtin Circle', especially Voloshinov and Medvedev. The material is organized thematically to provide a contextual basis of Bakhtin's thought and his central influences, including an investigation of the key concepts in Bakhtin's work (such as aesthetics, carnival, dialogism, the chronotope, and ethics); the major debates and interpretations around Bakhtin's writings; comparisons between Bakhtin and other significant sociocultural theorists, notably Foucault, Derrida, Habermas and Gramsci; and appropriations and applications of Bakhtin's ideas in such diverse fields as anthropology, geography, cultural studies and psychology. This unparalleled collection provides readers with the best secondary work on Bakhtin. It enriches our understanding of this prolific and multi-dimensional figure whose contribution stretches over the fields of cultural studies, linguistics, social philosophy, sociology and beyond. 2003, Sage Publications.
Critiques of Everyday Life
Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the study of everyday life within the social sciences and humanities. In Critiques of Everyday Life Michael Gardiner proposes that there exists a counter-tradition within everyday life theorising. This counter-tradition has sought not merely to describe lived experience, but to transform it by elevating our understanding of the everyday to the status of a critical knowledge.
In his analysis Gardiner engages with the work of a number of significant theorists and approaches that have been marginalized by mainstream academe, including: the French tradition of everyday life theorising, from the surrealists to Henri Lefebvre, and from the Situationist International to Michel de Certeau; Agnes Heller and the relationship between the everyday, rationality and ethics; Carnival, prosaics and intersubjectivity in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin; and Dorothy E. Smith's feminist perspective on everyday life.
Critiques of Everyday Life demonstrates the importance of an alternative, multidisciplinary everyday life paradigm and offers a myriad of new possibilities for critical social and cultural theorising and empirical research. 2000, Routledge.
Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words
Bakhtin and the Human Sciences demonstrates the abundance of ideas Bakhtin's thought offers to the human sciences, and reconsiders him as a social thinker, not just a literary theorist. The contributors hail from many disciplines and their essays' implications extend into other fields in the human sciences. The volume emphasizes Bakhtin's work on dialogue, carnival, ethics and everyday life, as well as the relationship between Bakhtin's ideas and those of other important social theorists.
In a lively introduction Gardiner and Bell discuss Bakhtin's significance as a major intellectual figure and situate his ideas within current trends and developments in social theory. 1998, Sage Publications.
