Author Archives
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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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Helene Cixous and Poststructuralist Feminist Theory
Helene Cixous‘ work has been influenced by Derridean deconstruction. Essays such as The Laugh of the Medusa, Sorties, Coming to Writing and Other Essays (1991), Readings and The Newly Born Woman (with Catherine Clement, translation in 1986) are her attempts to discover… Read More ›
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Luce Irigaray and Psychoanalytic Feminism
In her works like Speculum of the Other Woman (translated 1985) and This Sex Which is Not One (1987), Luce Irigaray has argued that the woman has been constructed as the specular Other of man in all Western discourses. Combining Psychoanalysis,… Read More ›
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The Political Theory of Carole Pateman
Carole Pateman‘s work has been in the realm of political theory. Pateman argues that for political theory to become more democratic it must develop a truly general theory of the political. This must necessarily avoid the trap of disqualifying certain… Read More ›
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Key Concepts of Michele Le Doeuff
A philosopher by profession and training Michele Le Doeuff‘s The Philosophical Imaginary (1989) argued that philosophy has a specific imaginary level intrinsic to itself. This imaginary level sets the conditions of what can be constructed as rationality within it. For Le… Read More ›
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Eli Zaretsky and Socialist Feminism
Eli Zaretsky‘s Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (1976), along with the work of Juliet Mitchell in Woman’s Estate (1974) and the writings of Zillah Eisenstein, is an important text in the socialist-feminist tradition. A brief sketch of the central concerns… Read More ›
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Key Ideas of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Like Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar have analysed the nineteenth century for the position of the woman novelist in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), the 2-volume No Man’s Land (1987-89) and their edition of The Norton Anthology of Literature by… Read More ›
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Ellen Moers: An Introduction
Ellen Moers‘ Literary Women (1976) was, along with Gilbert and Gubar’s , one of the early attempts to uncover the female literary tradition. Reading a range of authors like George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Moers… Read More ›
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Juliet Mitchell and Psychoanalytic Feminism
Writing in the sixties and seventies, Juliet Mitchell’s work in Woman’s Estate (1971), Mitchell argued that woman’s oppression was linked to FOUR essential social structures: production, reroduction, sexuality and socialization. Mitchell sought to combine a critique of socialist thought and… Read More ›
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Psychoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari
Deleuze and Guattari are unusual subjects for the study of Psychoanalysis because their work has attempted to reveal the bourgeois ideology imbedded in the apparent “radicalism” of psychoanalysis. They therefore focus on the institutionalization of psychoanalysis in works like Anti-Oedipus (… Read More ›
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Nancy Chodorow and Feminist Psychoanalysis
Nancy Chodorow is studied under both Psychoanalysis and Feminism. In two important works The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) and Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989), Chodorow combines the object relations theories of Melanie Klein with contemporary gender concerns. (1) Chodorow argues… Read More ›
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Shoshana Felman and Psychoanalytic Criticism
Shoshana Felman is one of the most important post-Lacaniain psychoanalysts. Felman’s work is situated at the interface of Postmodernism, cultural criticism and Psychoanalysis. The following ideas from Felman’s work are of great import. (1) Adapting the ideas of the speech -act… Read More ›
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Key Concepts of A.J. Greimas
A.J. Greimas‘ work has been an effort to analyse all forms of discourse. Greimas emphasizes the idea that language is an “assemblage of structures of signification” which implies that the language system cannot be “given” in advance but must be… Read More ›
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C.S. Peirce and the Semiotics
C.S. Peirce worked on logic and semiotics (this latter term he translated from the Greek), frequently linking the two. He argued that signs are the vehicles for thought as well as the articulation of logical forms. Peirce differs from Saussure… Read More ›
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Roman Jakobson’s Contribution to Structuralism and Semiotics
One of the most distinguished thinkers in linguistics, philology and aesthetics, Jakobson was responsible for the development of semiotics as a critical practice. Since his work is extremely wide-ranging in scope, Jakobson’s contribution to semiotics and structuralism alone are discussed… Read More ›
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Gerard Genette and Structural Narratology
The most important of the structural narratologists, Gerard Genette, has argued for the autonomous nature of the literary text. Genette’s work has been of particular use to literary critics for his attempts to develop models of reading texts in a… Read More ›
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Umberto Eco and the Semiotics
Eco proceeds from the Peircean assumption of “unlimited semiosis.” Though unlimited semiosis indicates that signs always refer to other signs (and that a text is open to infinite interpretations), Eco seeks a middle ground between univocal meaning and infinite meanings. For… Read More ›
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Julia Kristeva and the Semanalysis
Kristeva first came into prominence for her work on Bakhtin Seeking to counter the “necrophilia”as (Kristeva called it) of phenomenology and structural linguistics, she suggested “semanalysis,” a portmanteau term derived from semiology (Saussure) and psychoanalysis (Freud) to address an element… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Geoffrey Hartman
Hartman advocates the use of incomplete references, and seeks a critical language that is highly figurative and critical at the same time. His is a rich in eccentric style of writing that is self-conscious and constantly calls attention to the… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Paul de Man
One of the most important members of the Yale School of deconstruction, de Man developed a rigorous critical practice of reading texts, which may be termed “rhetorical reading.” (1) For de Man language is always figurative and not referential and… Read More ›
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