William Vaios Spanos is a Heideggerian

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

 literary critic. Spanos is a Distinguished Professor of English

English literature

English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 and comparative literature

Comparative literature

Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...

 at Binghamton University

Binghamton University

Binghamton University, also formally called State University of New York at Binghamton, , is a public research university in the State of New York. The University is one of the four university centers in the State University of New York system...

, Binghamton, New York

Binghamton, New York

Binghamton is a city in the Southern Tier of New York in the United States. It is near the Pennsylvania border, in a bowl-shaped valley at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers...

; he is a founder and editor of the critical journal boundary 2. His work draws heavily on the philosophical legacy of Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

, and while it does show the influence of the deconstruction

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...

 of Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

 and Paul de Man

Paul de Man

Paul de Man was a Belgian-born deconstructionist literary critic and theorist.He began teaching at Bard College. Later, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the late 1950s...

, Spanos's vocabulary and concepts remain closer to Heidegger's Destruktion ("destruction") of metaphysics

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...

 than to its philosophical successors.

He completed his Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

University of Wisconsin–Madison

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...

 in 1964.

Spanos takes a post-modern approach to the West, globalization

Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...

, colonization, and general interventionist foreign policy

Foreign policy

A country's foreign policy, also called the foreign relations policy, consists of self-interest strategies chosen by the state to safeguard its national interests and to achieve its goals within international relations milieu. The approaches are strategically employed to interact with other countries...

. He talks about a problem/solution mindset that America was in during Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

, and how all foreign policy now is still stuck in this framework. Spanos' work derives from philosophers ranging from Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

 and Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...

 to Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

.

Books

• Repetitions: the Postmodern Occasion in Literature and Culture, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
  Louisiana State University
  Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, most often referred to as Louisiana State University, or LSU, is a public coeducational university located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The University was founded in 1853 in what is now known as Pineville, Louisiana, under the name...
  
   Press, 1987
• The End of Education: Toward Postshumanism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
  University of Minnesota
  The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
  
   Press, 1993
• Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993
• The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Cold War, the Canon, and the Struggle for American Literary Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University
  Duke University
  Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
  
   Press, 1995
• America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire, University of Minnesota
  University of Minnesota
  The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
  
   Press, 1999
• In the Neighborhood of Zero, University of Nebraska Press, 2010

Papers

• Heidegger's Parmenides: Greek Modernity and the Classical Legacy, in Modern Greek Studies
• Heidegger, Nazism, and the Repressive Hypothesis: The American Appropriation of the Question, in boundary 2
  Boundary 2
  boundary 2 is an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies, theory, libertarian politics and literary criticism. In the 1970s and 1980s it was one of the primary venues for poststructuralist literary theory in the United States. It is edited primarily at the University of Pittsburgh and...
  
  , vol. 17, 1990
• Althusser's 'Problematic' in the Context of the Vietnam War: Towards a Spectral Politics, in Rethinking Marxism, vol. 10, no. 3, 1998
• Rethinking the Postmodernity of the Discourse of Postmodernism, in International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice ed. Hans Bertens and Douwwe Fokkema (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1997)

External links

• His homepage at Binghamton University