In A New Philosophy of Discourse (Bloomsbury 2020), Josh Kates explores a novel approach to understanding the fundamental building blocks of communication. Coining an original concept of discourse, or talk!, that Kates presents as more fundamental than language, he argues that writing and speech take shape entirely as events, situated within histories, contexts, and traditions themselves always in the making. Combining literary theory, literary criticism, and philosophy to reveal a new perspective on discourse, Kates focuses on literary criticism, literary texts by Charles Bernstein and Stanley Elkin, and the philosophical writings of Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson and Martin Heidegger.
Joshua Kates is Professor of English at IU Bloomington, where he teaches and writes on 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone texts, especially ones where issues pertaining to the modeling of language and history arise. He is the author of three books, including Essential History: Jacques Derrida and The Development of Deconstruction (SPEP 2005), Fielding Derrida: Deconstruction in the Fields of Philosophy, History, and Beyond (Fordham, 2008), and A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound.
The College of Arts