Tom Cohen questions the way history, ideology and politics are invoked in contemporary cultural studies. Enlisting the work of three seminal figures in literary theory--Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and M. Bakhtin--Cohen argues for a new politics of memory that moves beyond what he sees as our current paralyzing preoccupation with the present, and also for a new approach to the reading and analysis of cultural texts that breaks with the mimetic premises of traditional criticism.