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Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics, by Satya P. Mohanty
Although Satya Mohanty is sometimes dogmatic when attacking postmodern epistemology in Literary Theory and the Claims of History, eventually he rejects both dogmatism and relativism in favor of moral and cultural pluralism. He is not afraid to borrow particular insights from postmodern thinkers, but he counters the skepticism (and its corollary, relativism) that he perceives at the core of postmodern thought by proposing an alternative epistemology, "postpositivist realism." This "softened" positivism deploys the concepts of "objectivity," "universalism," "reason," and empirically verifiable "truth," but it also recognizes the dependence of knowledge on social institutions and conventions and thus presents itself as antifoundationalist, nonessentialist, not concerned with transcendence.
One need not be entirely sympathetic to the argument for postpositivist realism in order to benefit from Mohanty's readings of other theorists. The first two chapters move from a critique of de Man's view of "reference" to discussions of Bakhtin and Peirce that outline the need for a social and historical account of language. Two chapters are then devoted...