Author Archives
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Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy, Photography and Film
Emmanuel Levinas is among the least obvious of twentieth-century philosophers to feature in a volume devoted to philosophy of film. From a philosophical grounding in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger that remained an important influence throughout his career,… Read More ›
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Approach to Films
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote only one essay on film, yet his phenomenological approach informs problems of perception central to film. Taken up by some theorists as a welcome counterbalance to Marxist and psychoanalytic theories that tend to consider the film as… Read More ›
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Gay Criticism
Unlike lesbian criticism, gay criticism doesn’t tend to focus on efforts to define homosexuality. Sexual relations between men, or even just the sexual desire of one man for another, is the generally accepted criterion of gayness in white middle-class America… Read More ›
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Homi K Bhabha’s Theoretical Contributions to Film Studies
In his epistemological work on colonial and postcolonial discourse, cultural translation, hybridity and ambiguity, Homi Bhabha gives a central place to culture. Bhabha refers regularly to literature and (albeit to a lesser extent) to cinema. Speaking from a profoundly humanities… Read More ›
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Lesbian Film Theory and Criticism
Theoretical approaches to the cinematic representation of lesbianism represent a particularly complex and fruitful area of feminist film study, as well as one filled with substantial debate. Issues arise, for instance, concerning the exact definition of a lesbian film as… Read More ›
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Laura Mulvey, Male Gaze and the Feminist Film Theory
Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Citizen Kane (1992) and Death 24x a Second (2006). She… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Marshall McLuhan
Punning that one of his books was a ‘collide-oscope of interfaced situations’, the Canadian literary critic and internationally renowned media theorist, Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), also hints at how his conceptual terrain needs to be viewed: through multiple lenses that bring different… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Gayatri Spivak
A focus on Gayatri Spivak’s education and intellectual trajectory reveals a lifelong commitment to literary-critical studies alongside genuine political engagement. Spivak was born in Calcutta, India in 1942; she later attended Presidency College at the University of Calcutta. After graduating… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Paul Ricoeur
Two different traditions in the study of language and philosophy come together magisterially in Paul Ricoeur’s (1913–2005) study The Rule of Metaphor (1975; trans. 1977), with Anglo-American and ‘French’ approaches thereby brought into dialogue. While there is much talk of transdisciplinary… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Lionel Trilling
A writer of significance in the history of American letters, even at the height of his fame Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) was considered ‘a critic without portfolio’. What this means for the contemporary reader, used to critical categories, theories and factional… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Slavoj Zizek
The Slovenian Lacanian Hegelian Slavoj Zizek (1949– ) is the contemporary dialectician par excellence; the mapping of his identity via the three descriptors that open this sentence, which can be variously positioned and re-positioned, is one way of temporarily locating him…. Read More ›
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Key Theories of Paul Gilroy
It is no mere incidental comment that opens the preface to Paul Gilroy’s (1956– ) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993): ‘This book was first conceived while I was working at South Bank Polytechnic in London’s Elephant and Castle.’… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer
The dream of recovering the complete or total meaning of a literary text, by re-imagining the author’s intentions, comes to an end with the work of Hans Georg Gadamer (1900–2002; instead… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Michel Foucault
Over three decades after his death, Michel Foucault’s (1920–1984) legacy continues to impact upon the humanities. Key phrases and concepts drawn from Foucault’s historical work now form part of the everyday language of criticism and analysis. Foucault’s texts continue to… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Wayne C. Booth
Writing just over two decades after the publication of Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Shlomith Rimmon Kenan ponders the relationship between the actual author of a text and its ‘implied author’ as described by Booth; writing about… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), best known for a text called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction where the world of mass produced artworks, in particular those of photography and film, are explored. Benjamin is also regarded as an… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Terry Eagleton
Writing about the impossibility of filming philosophy, Eagleton suggests a dialectical solution: find a scriptwriter interested in ideas (Eagleton) and a director with visual imagination (Derek Jarmen); the resulting unhappy consciousness soon resolves itself with an outstanding film about Ludwig… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Houston A. Baker, JR
Finding common ground between theory and the ‘founding condition of Afro-American intellectual history’, Houston A. Baker, Jr argues that both seek explanations at a ‘metalevel’. Baker comes to this conclusion because of the way in which his intellectual project is… Read More ›
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Pauline Johnson and Radical Humanism
Pauline Johnson has sought to re-situate feminism within the humanist tradition. Arguing against the anti-humanism of contemporary feminism, Johnson’s Feminism as Radical Humanism (1994) argues that feminism must see itself as “the interpreter of the cultural ideals of modern humanism.”… Read More ›
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Michele Barrett and Marxist Feminism
Writing under the influence of Marx and cultural materialism, Michele Barrett in Women ‘s Oppression Today (1988) argues that a feminist analysis of “culture” is imperative today. Barrett’s engagements with aesthetics and subjectivity have proved to be the cutting edge… Read More ›
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