Alan Liu

“This book is a reflection of and on a nearly twenty-year career. It is as much a work of history as of literary and cultural critique, as much a narrative and a piece of performance art as it is philosophical investigation and Nietzschean genealogy. Alan Liu is sui generis.”

“Following the magnificent achievement of The Laws of Cool, Alan Liu in Local Transcendence takes on the problem he astutely identified as deeply connected with the ‘cool’: the loss of historical grounding and consequent restructuring of identities by postindustrial corporations. Offering a rigorous yet humane critique of new historicism and cultural criticism from the inside, he interrogates the possibilities for historical grounding in the age of information in a witty prose style and a capacious field of reference. Local Transcendence is required reading for anyone interested in the multiple conjunctions, oppositions, and synergies between information, historicism, and cultural context.”

“Before he turned to digital humanities, Alan Liu once posed the key question for the new historicism: what’s the connection? What’s the connection, for example, between two juxtaposed details or anecdotes in a cultural field? Now he has reframed both inquiries with a broader question that raises the level of both the game and its stakes: what is the connection between the ‘new historicism’ and the ‘new media’? The result is a book that addresses the central question of the ‘link’ itself in our age and that links the link not only conceptually but also historically. It is a book for anyone interested in how disciplinary and technological innovation in the humanities have informed each other over these past two decades.”