Literary and Critical Theory最新文献

{"title":"Jonathan Goldberg","authors":"Marcie Frank","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0090","url":null,"abstract":"Astonishingly prolific, literary theorist Jonathan Goldberg has published fourteen books, and edited or coedited five more. Goldberg took his PhD in 1968 from Columbia University with a dissertation on John Donne’s Devotions, supervised by Edward Tayler. Widely recognized as a meticulous scholar and a writer of dazzling and playful prose, Goldberg has published on all the major authors of the English Renaissance. His early work provided models of how to use the most significant paradigms of post-structuralist literary theory in the study of Renaissance literature. He helped to inaugurate queer Renaissance studies in the 1990s with Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (1992) and Queering the Renaissance (1994). Along with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Moon, and Judith Butler, Goldberg played a vital role in disseminating queer theory as a scholar, a coeditor of Series Q at Duke University Press, and as a teacher. Goldberg’s thinking has always been centripetal and transversal. He has worked across numerous study areas, including Renaissance and contemporary, English and American, homo and hetero, gay and queer, men and women, and gay and lesbian. He traverses both geography and temporality, analyzing the discourses of sodomy in the Old and New Worlds, and bringing Shakespeare’s Tempest together with its reception in 20th-century Caribbean writing. He has written about Renaissance and 20th-century women writers alongside their male counterparts as well as on their own. He has worked across media, analyzing the paintings of Tintoretto, the opera of Beethoven, and the films of Hitchcock, Fassbinder, and Todd Haynes. He has upheld the same rigorous standards of scholarship in everything he has published. Goldberg has served the profession of literary studies beyond the boundaries of the early modern period, in no small part by calling them into question. In its coherence, his oeuvre marks out the territory upon which literary interpretation stakes its claims to intellectual value beyond period specialization and for the rest of the humanities. Now Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor Emeritus at Emory University, previously Goldberg was Sir William Osler Professor of English at The Johns Hopkins University (1986–2006), where he also served as senior editor at ELH (2002–2006). He also taught at Duke University (1995–1998), Brown University (1985–1986), and Temple University (1968–1985). In addition to his own scholarship, Goldberg edited a posthumous collection of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing, The Weather in Proust (2011), and coedited a collection of essays, This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature (2016), and has edited Milton (1991).","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114393815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Socialist/Marxist Feminism","authors":"W. Lee","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0088","url":null,"abstract":"The long arc of Marxist scholarship certainly reaches many domains—economics, sociology, political ecology. However, few scholarly projects have likely benefited more, or offered more, to sustaining the relevance of Marx and Marxism than the feminist analysis, interpretation, and application of the Marxist critique of capitalism. From the earliest translations of Marxist thought into revolutionary action, socialist feminists have sought to introduce sex and gender as salient categories of capitalist oppression, arguing that being a woman bound to patriarchal institutions such as marriage is comparable to a working-class laborer bound to the wage. Friedrich Engels also plays a key role in the socialist feminist appropriation of Marxist ideas. By showing the extent to which marriage is about the maintenance and expansion of property, Engels opens the door to a wide range of analysis concerning the material conditions of women’s lives and labors. Marxist ideas become the focus of renewed interest over the course of the American civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s. It is thus unsurprising that a wealth of new feminist and antiracist theories begin to develop during this period, as well as analyses of structural inequality, including oppression with respect to the LGBTQ community. It is perhaps the most recent work among socialist feminists, in league with other activists and theorists, however, that is both truest to Marx’s original intent and that demonstrates the relevance of his ideas to the future fortunes of human societies, namely, the application of Marxist critique to environmental deterioration—especially anthropogenic climate change. Hence, the following is organized historically but also topically. It begins with the work of early socialist feminists, looking to include women within Marxist categories of class analysis but quickly moves to arguments that sex and gender—and then race/ethnicity and sexual identity—constitute their own salient categories of oppression. This explosion of theory and activism deserves to be treated topically so that the variety and breadth of socialist feminist ideas as well as the divisions and debates among its representatives becomes clear. The critique of capitalism has, of course, always been an essentially global enterprise. It is thus not surprising that the extension of socialist feminist analyses to the Global North and Global South would produce a wealth of insight and activism. For many of the same reasons, the same is true of the rise of socialist ecofeminism. The last section comes full circle. Devoted to arguments whose focus is the justification and fomenting of revolution, The Communist Manifesto finds its place next to contemporary socialist ecofeminist calls for workers from all regions of the planet to unite to overthrow once and for all the capitalist economic system responsible for jeopardizing the planet’s capacity to support life.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"118 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127562018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Abdul R. JanMohamed","authors":"T. Mukhopadhyay","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0087","url":null,"abstract":"Abdul R. JanMohamed (b. 1945) has made a seminal contribution to postcolonial and black studies since the early 1980s. JanMohamed was born and raised in Kenya and educated in Britain and the United States, receiving his PhD from Brandeis University. Since 1982 he has taught in the English Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and has also been Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University. He developed a body of Marxian-psychoanalytical criticism based on Marx, Foucault, Fanon, and Freud. Most of his important publications came out in the 1980s and 1990s, although he is continuing to write and diversify into other areas of postcolonial criticism like Subaltern and Dalit literature. In the 1980s JanMohamed started with analysis of the psychopolitical structures of colonial and African English novels written by Joyce Cary, Isak Dinesen, Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Alex La Guma, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. In the next phase of his writings, he critiqued the African American slave autobiography of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the novels of Richard Wright, which now constitute an ideological reference for all future criticism on the literature of colonized and marginalized peoples. His most important single-author publications include Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (1983) for which he was awarded the Choice book of the year award in 1984. The other crucial read is The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (2005) about which Rolland Murray insightfully commented in the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Murray 2006, cited under Book Reviews) that “Should African American studies continue in its pursuit of rendering the vagaries of death intellectually legible, the field should turn to this book as one of its signal events” (Exquisite Corpus, p. 302). JanMohamed considers racial lynching as the most fundamental mode of coercion. In his work on African American Literature, he develops a reflexive Marxian-phenomenological approach through which he deconstructs the feelings of marginalized protagonists who, faced with the threat of death by lynching, begin to contemplate the effects of that threat on their subjectivities. He suggests that the threat of death activates the death drive like a negative dialectic in subjects irremediably trapped between two cultures. In 1985, along with Donna Przybylowicz, he founded and edited the journal Cultural Critique, which at the time offered one of the very few venues for the theorization of postcolonial and American minority discourses. His recent works involve psychoanalytical studies of Dalit narratives of the Indian subcontinent. JanMohamed’s critical oeuvre has been acclaimed and translated into other Asian languages.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128277971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gloria E. Anzaldúa","authors":"Vivian Rodríguez-Rocha, Gloria González-López","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0086","url":null,"abstract":"Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was born in Raymondville, Texas in 1942. A self-described Chicana feminist lesbian writer and cultural theorist, her work has been pivotal for the development of Chicana and Chicano Studies (also Chicana/o Studies) and has had a significant impact in the fields of queer studies, disability studies, women’s and gender studies, Chicana feminism, and critical race theory. Anzaldúa’s works are as multifaceted as she was. They comprise a wide range of genres, from the more traditional essay to the self-developed autohistoria, along with drawings, children’s books, fiction, and poetry. Her writings engage in complex theorizations regarding identity, subjectivity, epistemology, embodiment, politics, spirituality, and social transformation—all written in an approachable style. Borderlands theory, arguably her most notable contribution across different fields and disciplines, is developed at length in Borderlands/La Frontera and based on her own experiences growing up in the U.S.–Mexico border as a sixth generation Chicana. This acclaimed book has been consistently engaged with across the disciplinary board in Western academia and beyond. Her series of edited collections of writings by women of color and, in particular, This Bridge Called My Back have also become canonical texts for literary studies. A devoted student and educator, Anzaldúa graduated college with a bachelor of arts in English and Education, taught in the Texas school system, earned a master’s degree, and later made most of her income as a lecturer in universities all over the country. At the time of her death, she had attained all but dissertation status in a doctoral program at UC Santa Cruz and was working on her dissertation. A doctoral degree was awarded to her posthumously on the basis of previous merits. However, her relationship with academia was always tense, marked by a constant struggle to legitimize her chosen topics of study, methods, and writing style—famously unwilling to conform to Western academic standards through her signature use of code-switching, the resignification of indigenous symbolism, and her engagement with spirituality in serious theoretical terms. She died in May 2004 from diabetes complications. Upon her death a wealth of materials from her life and work were collected in a dedicated archive housed at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2007, Chicana writer and professor Norma Elia Cantú founded the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa (SSGA) to establish a space for academic communities and beyond for the development of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s inspirational intellectual contributions.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130956518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hayden White","authors":"Karyn Ball, E. Domańska","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0084","url":null,"abstract":"Hayden White (b. 12 July 1928–d. 5 March 2018) was a groundbreaking critic of conventional historiography whose emphasis on the moral, rhetorical, aesthetic, and fictive valences of narrative as a mode of figuration unsettled professional historians’ tendency to disavow the role of the imagination and form in the selective arrangement of evidence. Despite Metahistory’s manifest affinity with structuralist approaches, White’s 1973 monograph is widely viewed as having inaugurated a “postmodernist” critique of narrative historiography that resonated with the growing influence of a postwar, anti-positivist “linguistic turn” stressing the figural dynamics of texts as objects of discourse. In grasping the implications of referential fragility, White articulated a quintessentially Nietzschean antipathy toward naively mimetic notions of “truth” that govern history treated as an objective mirror rather than as an imaginative construction of the past. In consonance with Roland Barthes, White recognized that narrative historiography shared stylistic ground with realist fiction in adhering to poetic conventions that shore up the “referential illusion,” or the reader’s feeling that descriptive writing bears an intimate relationship with a sometimes arbitrary and disordered reality. Insisting upon historical narrative’s status as a verbal structure, White additionally demonstrated that history’s figural operations are irreducible to a rigorously logical methodology and “science” as such insofar as history’s form reflects choices that cannot be evaluated on epistemological grounds. For this reason, while traditional historians continue to disavow the import of White’s interventions, scholarship in the humanities and social sciences attests to his abiding influence beyond the critique of historiography. Before the appearance in 1973 of the textbook The Greco-Roman Tradition and his monograph Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White translated Carlo Antoni’s From History to Sociology: The Transition in German Historical Thinking from Italian (with a foreword by Benedetto Croce) (1959); co-authored two textbooks respectively entitled The Emergence of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, Vol. 1: From the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution (1966) with Willson H. Coates and J. Salwyn Schapiro; and, again with Coates, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, Vol. 2: Since the French Revolution (1970). White also edited The Uses of History: Essays in Intellectual and Social History (1968) and co-edited Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium with Giorgio Tagliacozzo (1969). With his wife, Professor Margaret Brose, White co-edited Representing Kenneth Burke in 1982, but following Metahistory, he primarily published essays, some of which reappeared in four collections: Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978); The Content of the Form: Narrative Di","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115606762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"I. A. Richards","authors":"J. Russo","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0083","url":null,"abstract":"Ivor Armstrong Richards (b. 26 February 1893; d. 7 September 1979) is among the most and influential theorists and critics of literature in the 20th century. A student of Moral Science at Cambridge University (1911–1915), he was the intellectual offspring of the Age of Principia. Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Alfred North Whitehead, among others, were completing a philosophical revolution by rejecting varieties of 19th-century idealism, seeking to ground philosophy in first principles, and reasserting a native empiricism with an emphasis on language, logic, and analysis. The Newtonian term is apropos because there had been nothing so sweeping in British philosophy since the 17th century. Richards taught in the new English School at Cambridge from 1919 to 1939, where he developed his ideas and conducted his famous experiments in reading, resulting in Practical Criticism, thereby becoming one of the founders of New Criticism. The interdisciplinary play of his writings has led to his being labeled a linguist, a psychologist, or a philosopher. Yet the deepest vein of his interest lay in the theory and practice of criticism. He best belongs in an anthology together with Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot; not in one with De Saussure, Jakobson, or Chomsky; nor in one with Skinner, Piaget, and Allport; nor in one with Dewey, Ayer, and Quine. The peaks of his achievement in the 1920s are The Meaning of Meaning (with C. K. Ogden) (1923), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and Practical Criticism (1929). His ideas were widely disseminated in his compendium Science and Poetry (1926). Richards’s involvement with Basic English, which was the creation of C. K. Ogden, grew throughout the 1930s, becoming almost a second career. Basic English is a technique of learning the language based on 850 key words, the ones that could do the most work with the least effort (there are only sixteen verbs). He wrote four books on Basic in the 1930s alone, spending three years in China in the hope of creating a national experiment. Meanwhile, these studies in language learning (and second-language learning) alternated with theory of criticism: Coleridge on Imagination; The Philosophy of Rhetoric, with its revolutionary theory of metaphor; and Interpretation in Teaching, which attempted to perform for prose what he had done with poetry in Practical Criticism. Thus, there were the two careers, like parallel corridors, at times crossing each other’s path, or at the least with windows open between them. From 1939 to 1974 he taught at Harvard University, becoming University Professor in 1944. Basic English and Its Uses (1943) remains his most useful introduction to the subject. The Pocket Book of Basic English: A Self-Teaching Way into English (1945), coauthored by Christine M. Gibson, led to his Language through Pictures series, eventually including eight languages, some of which went into film-strip and other media as the technology became available. He was made a Companion ","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116573880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Environmental Ethics","authors":"W. Lee","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0085","url":null,"abstract":"While many disciplines have begun to take the environment, its inhabitants, ecosystems, biotic diversity, and future stability more seriously, it falls to philosophy to flesh out the organizing concepts and principles of a viable environmental ethic. An ethic is a defensible way of life grounded in the wherewithal to address the anthropogenic causes of environmental crises like climate change. However true is Socrates’ claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, what counts as “worth living” must now recalibrate in light of a future characterized by catastrophic weather events, dwindling resources, accelerated disease vectors, human and nonhuman migration, and the geopolitical upheaval either caused or accelerated by a warming atmosphere. Can the appeal to traditional moral theories intended to adjudicate human conflicts be retooled to address contemporary environmental crises? This is not obvious. Moral principles made to solve human moral dilemmas have not prevented the pollution and exhaustion of limited planetary and atmospheric resources, and we no longer take it for granted that human welfare is the sole focus of moral concern. Notions like inherent worth, biotic integrity, and sustainability have become integral to environmental ethics discourse along with serious exploration of the moral considerability of nonhuman animals. Can a human-centered—anthropocentric—environmental ethic provide sufficient incentive to address environmental crises? Does sentience have moral weight beyond human consciousness? Whose suffering matters? Do we have any moral duty to care about the future? Some argue that the fact of climate change reveals our traditional moral principles to be inadequate. They argue we need an ethic that aims to reach beyond human beings. Others argue that, suitably modified, long-standing moral ideals aimed at maximizing happiness or minimizing suffering can help us draft a more sustainable ethical charter, or that rights can be extended to the protection of nonhuman entities. Still others argue for an ecological version of the precautionary principle: wherever an action, practice, policy, law, or (de)regulation poses a well-supported likelihood of causing harm to the planet’s regenerative capacities or to its atmosphere, the burden to demonstrate that harm will not occur as a consequence of that action falls on the actor(s) or agencies responsible for it. The precautionary principle is anthropocentric, but it includes the active recognition of interdependency as prerequisite for survival. A number of feminist, antiracist, and social justice theorists show how the intersection of ecology, economics, ethnicity, gender, and species status informs the ways in which we conceive environmental issues as matters of justice.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126927256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Slavoj Žižek","authors":"Jamil Khader","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0080","url":null,"abstract":"Slavoj Žižek was born on March 21, 1949, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in the former Yugoslavia. Žižek studied philosophy and sociology as an undergraduate student and completed a master of arts degree in philosophy in 1975 at the University of Ljubljana, writing a 400-page thesis on French structuralism. In 1981, he earned his first doctor of arts degree in philosophy, writing his dissertation on German idealism. Four years later, Žižek successfully defended his second doctoral dissertation titled, “Philosophy Between the Symptom and the Fantasy,” a Lacanian reading of Hegel, Marx, and Kripke, which he completed under the direction of Lacan’s son in law, Jacques-Alain Miller, in Paris. Žižek is one of the most prominent members of the Ljubljana Lacanian School, a group of theorists who have been affiliated with the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana since the 1970s. Žižek also cofounded the Liberal Democratic Party in Slovenia and ran as its candidate in the first multiparty presidential elections in the country in 1990, narrowly missing office. Later, he completely broke with Slovene public space and became engaged in global radical Leftist politics. He is currently a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana; the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London; Eminent Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; returning faculty member of the European Graduate School; and visiting professor at the German Department of New York University. Since 1991 he has also held visiting positions at different universities in the United States and United Kingdom. He is also the editor of three major book series, including WO ES WAR, Short Circuits, and SIC Series. In 2012, Foreign Policy listed Žižek as one of its top influential 100 global thinkers, and in 2018 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, Spain). Ever since the publication of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, in 1989, Žižek has become known as one of the most provocative and innovative philosophers in the world. Žižek has developed a challenging dialectical materialist philosophical system that appropriates the late Lacan to reload and retrieve Hegel through Marxism, Christianity, and quantum physics in order to describe the structure of reality (ontology) and to articulate the basis for collective revolutionary change through a wide range of cultural, folkloric (jokes), literary, religious, political, scientific, and philosophical references. Žižek has published extensively, almost a monograph a year, on a wide range of topics, and has been engaged in many debates and controversies that attest to his commitment to reformulating the questions that philosophers, psychoanalysts, political scientists, activists, and the general public have been asking about common everyday notions about reality and its relationship to the subject. Žižek has consequently established a ph","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116754611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Catherine Belsey","authors":"Pamela Mccallum","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0082","url":null,"abstract":"Catherine Belsey (b. 13 December 1940) is a British scholar distinguished in the areas of literary and cultural theory, Shakespeare studies, early modern studies, and feminism. Educated at the Universities of Oxford, Somerville College (BA), and Warwick (MA, PhD), she taught at the University of Cambridge (New Hall). Moving to University College Cardiff as a Lecturer in English in 1975, she was appointed Professor of English in 1989 and Distinguished Research Professor in 2002, a position she held until 2006. A Research Professor at Swansea University from 2006 to her retirement in 2014, Belsey holds an appointment as Visiting Professor at University of Derby (2014–2020). She is a Fellow of the English Association (2001) and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (2013). Together with Terence Hawkes, Stephen Heath, Terry Eagleton, and others, Belsey became an important voice in the burgeoning interest in French theories in the late 1970s. Her books deploy French structuralist and post-structuralist theories to open up possibilities for innovative analyses of literary and cultural texts. Her achievement lies in producing a body of literary and cultural criticism that acknowledges its rootedness in a present moment and deploys theoretical insights to achieve nuanced readings of texts from earlier historical periods—research that connects her with the British cultural materialist criticism of scholars such as Alan Sinfield, Louis Montrose, and Jonathan Dollimore. For Belsey, “text” has a very broad meaning: art, sculpture, architecture, film, novels, drama, poetry, and other writings can all be read as cultural texts. In these assumptions, Belsey draws on the earlier writings of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, who both questioned an elitist division of high/low culture and extended the meaning of culture to include a whole way of life. The breadth of references in her books is unquestionably impressive: medieval theology, eighteenth-century country house architecture, funerary sculpture, carvings on household furniture, Renaissance paintings, detective novels, contemporary action films, and even cartoons make appearances in her analyses. All of these, and more, offer perceptions into how cultures order themselves into what they assume to be dominant modes and also into to what they understand to be resistant. Her books on Shakespeare, Milton, tragedy, and desire all explore how cultural texts negotiate these pressures, tensions, and anxieties. Feminism and gender figure as important questions throughout her research. Belsey’s commitment to pedagogy and learning is evident in several introductory books accessible to nonspecialists.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134448973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Postmodernism","authors":"H. Bertens","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0081","url":null,"abstract":"The terms “postmodern” and “postmodernism” first of all referred to new departures in the arts, in literature, and in architecture that had their origins in the 1950s and early 1960s, gained momentum in the course of the 1960s, and became a dominant factor in the 1970s. After their heyday in the 1980s, postmodern innovations had either run their course or were absorbed by the mainstream, if not commercialized by the advertising industry. On a more intangible level, the terms referred to the new “postmodern” sensibility that had given rise to those innovations, but that also manifested itself more broadly in, for instance, the so-called counterculture of the later 1960s. This postmodern sensibility was irreverent, playful, and ironic. It rejected the distinction between high art and popular culture and demystified the status of art and the artist. Its articulation in the form of literary criticism—where the label “postmodern” first gained wide currency—prefigured the theory-driven criticism that arose in the course of the 1970s and that was heavily indebted to French poststructuralism. In the next decade, this postmodern criticism or critique, an amalgam of poststructuralist ideas and assumptions, branched out into all directions, making itself felt in historiography, ethnography, musicology, religious studies, management and organization studies, legal studies, leisure studies, and other areas that unexpectedly experienced a postmodern moment, or even a more lasting postmodern reorientation. Finally, and at its most encompassing level, the term postmodern was applied to late-20th-century Western society as a whole. The argument here was that somewhere in the postwar period modernity had given way to a postmodernity that recognizably constituted a new economic and sociocultural formation. There was not much agreement as to the exact turning point, or on the nature, of the new “postmodern condition,” but its theorists, most of whom saw it as inextricably entangled with capitalism, even if some emphasized its emancipatory pursuit of heterogeneity and difference, argued that it was here to stay. If it did, it soon was left to its own devices. We have since the turn of the century not heard much about postmodernity. Postmodern criticism has fared better and though it, too, would seem to have run out of steam in the new millennium, it has fundamentally changed our perspectives on literature, architecture, the arts, and a host of other subjects, not the least of which is the rational, self-determined subject of Enlightenment humanism.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116922192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}