Author Archives
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Binarism in Post-colonial Theory
From ‘binary’, meaning a combination of two things, a pair, ‘two’, duality (OED), this is a widely used term with distinctive meanings in several fields and one that has had particular sets of meanings in post-colonial theory. The concern with… Read More ›
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Appropriation in Post-colonialism
A term used to describe the ways in which post-colonial societies take over those aspects of the imperial culture – language, forms of writing, film, theatre, even modes of thought and argument such as rationalism, logic and analysis – that… Read More ›
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Ambivalence in Post-colonialism
A term first developed in psychoanalysis to describe a continual fluctuation between wanting one thing and wanting its opposite. It also refers to a simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion from an object, person or action (Young 1995: 161). Adapted into… Read More ›
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Alterity in Post-colonialism
Alterity is derived from the Latin alteritas, meaning ‘the state of being other or different; diversity, otherness’. Its English derivatives are alternate, alternative, alternation, and alter ego. The term alterité is more common in French, and has the antonym identité… Read More ›
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Post-colonial Allegory
The simplest definition of allegory is a ‘symbolic narrative’ in which the major features of the movement of the narrative are all held to refer symbolically to some action or situation. Allegory has long been a prominent feature of literary… Read More ›
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African American and Post-colonial Studies
Recent work in post-colonial studies by United States’ scholars has stressed the relationship between post-colonial theory and the analysis of African American culture (DuCille 1996). In practice, the exponents of African American culture have often engaged with classic post-colonial theorists… Read More ›
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Cinema in the Age of New Media
A look at media at the beginning of the twenty-first century makes one thing certain: nothing is certain in terms of media boundaries and specificities. The cinema, for example, is a composite of elaborate sound and visual systems, enhanced by… Read More ›
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Psychoanalysis and the Cinema
Cinema and psychoanalysis were born around the same time. In 1895 the Grand Café of Paris hosted the first movie event of history, while at the same time Studies in Hysteria by Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud hit the shelves… Read More ›
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Third (World) Cinema and Film Theory
Third Cinema, as Stephen Crofts points out, is one of the most “elastic” concepts in the cinematic lexicon (Crofts 31). It is distinct from First Cinema, represented primarily by Hollywood, and Second Cinema, embodied by the European art cinema and… Read More ›
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The Sociology and Aesthetics of Film Adaptation
THE SOURCES OF FILMS Frequently the most narrow and provincial area of film theory, discourse about adaptation is potentially as far-reaching as you like. Its distinctive feature, the matching of the cinematic sign system to prior achievement in some other… Read More ›
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Diaspora Criticism Literary Theory
In attempting to set itself up as ‘a genre of theoretical writing’ (Frow, 1997, 15), diaspora criticism takes as its object a thing called ‘diaspora’. The viability of the critical genre, it follows, rests on defining and delimiting the object… Read More ›
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Spectral Criticism Literary Theory
It would be difficult to claim that there is such a thing as a ‘school’ or even emerging tradition of ‘spectral criticism’. Rather, what use of the term might seek to bring together would be a series of images and… Read More ›
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Spatial Criticism: Critical Geography, Space, Place and Textuality
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. As You Like It (II. vii…. Read More ›
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Gender and Transgender Criticism
In the introduction to their book Genders, David Glover and Cora Kaplan make the observation that: ‘gender is a much contested concept, as slippery as it is indispensable, but a site of unease rather than agreement’ (Glover and Kaplan, 2000, ix)…. Read More ›
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Fragmentation in Postmodern Novels
John Hawkes once divulged that when he began to write he assumed that “the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme”. Certainly many subsequent authors have done their best to sledgehammer these four literary cornerstones into… Read More ›
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Looseness of Association in Postmodern Works
Many postmodernist writers disrupt the smooth production and reception of texts by welcoming chance into the compositional process. The infamous The Unfortunates (1969) by B. S.Johnson, for instance, is a novel-in-a-box which instructs the reader to riffle several loose-leaf chapters… Read More ›
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Postmodern Paranoia
Paranoia, or the threat of total engulfment by somebody else’s system, is keenly felt by many of the dramatis personae of postmodernist fiction. It is tempting to speculate that this is an indirect mimetic representation of the climate of fear… Read More ›
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Modernism, Postmodernism and Film Criticism
Postmodern cinema ironically has a history now. In 1984, Fredric Jameson observed that contemporary culture seemed to be expressing a new form of ‘depthlessness‘ – a concentration on style and ‘surface’. For Jameson these features represented a retreat from the… Read More ›
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Cyberculture, Cyberpunk, Technopoly and Cybercriticism
Cyberculture: cyberspace, technoculture, virtual communities, virtual realities, virtual identities, virtual space, cyborgs, cybernetics, cyberbodies, spectacles, simulations, simulacra and so forth. Cyberculture exists within the globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed and/or computer-generated multidimensional virtual realities. Originally existing in the pages of science… Read More ›
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Chaos Theory, Complexity Theory and Literary Criticism
Chaos theory and complexity theory challenge some of our most deeply held beliefs about the nature of reality. The former claims that natural systems (for example, the weather) are controlled by mysterious forces, called ‘strange attractors‘, such that they are… Read More ›
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