Walter Benn Michaels

Who is Walter Benn Michaels?

Walter Benn Michaels is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Michaels’s work has generated a set of arguments and questions around a host of issues that are central to literary studies: problems of culture and race, identities national and personal, the difference between memory and history, disagreement and difference, and meaning and intention in interpretation.