Author Archives
Literariness is an open access collection of notes inviting everyone to explore the unfathomable English Language, Literature, and Theory. Feel free to discover and share knowledge.
Contributor: Nasrullah Mambrol
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Black Feminisms
The term ‘Black’ is radically unstable and is applied to various, related political positions. An attempt to trace the meanings that surround and inform this term involves an engagement with its geographical, cultural and political indeterminacies, with its reliance on… Read More ›
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Translation Studies
The 1980s was a decade of consolidation for the fledgling discipline known as Translation Studies. Having emerged onto the world stage in the late 1970s, the subject began to be taken seriously, and was no longer seen as an unscientific… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) has long enjoyed a reputation as both one of the finest poets of the Renaissance and an influential critic. He is best known for his epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581), whose topic was the First Crusade. This… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Jacopo Mazzoni
Born in Cesena, Italy, the Italian scholar Jacopo Mazzoni’s (1548–1598) major work was a philosophical treatise called De Triplici Hominum Vita, Activa Nempe, Contemplativa, e Religiosa Methodi Tres, 1576 (On the Three Ways of Man’s Life: The Active, the Contemplative,… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Lodovico Castelvetro
Lodovico Castelvetro (1505–1571) is best known for his stringent reformulation of Aristotle’s unities of time and place in drama, his rigid approach being subsequently endorsed by neoclassical writers. Also important in his writings, however, are his treatment of imitation, plot, the… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Giambattista Giraldi
The Italian dramatist, poet, and literary critic Giambattista Giraldi (1504–1573) was embroiled in a number of controversies. Like Dante, he spoke in favor of the use of vernacular languages and, as against the influential classical notions of literature deriving from Aristotle… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Christine de Pisan
Christine de Pisan (ca. 1365–1429) was perhaps the most articulate and prolific female voice of the European Middle Ages. Being widowed at the age of 25 without an inheritance and with three children, she was obliged to earn her living… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Giovanni Boccaccio
Though Boccaccio (1313–1375) wished to be known as a scholar, he is most widely known for his Decameron (1358), a collection of a hundred, sometimes bawdy, stories told by ten characters against the background of the bubonic plague that overtook… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Germaine de Staël
Germaine de Staël’s (1766–1817) life and writings intersect profoundly with a number of political, intellectual, and literary movements. To begin with, she was one of the heirs of Enlightenment thought; her friends and acquaintances included the Encyclopedists Denis Diderot and Jean… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Geoffrey de Vinsauf
Geoffrey de Vinsauf derives his name (de Vino Salvo in Latin) from a treatise on the preservation of wine which was attributed to him. However, it was not wine but poetics which earned him renown, though almost nothing is known… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Pierre de Ronsard
Like his friend and distant cousin Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) eventually studied under the supervision of the Hellenist Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret in Paris, an institution that housed a nucleus of seven poets known… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of George Gascoigne
The poet and dramatist George Gascoigne (1542–1577) is credited with having written the first literary-critical essay in the English language, entitled Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English. This essay appeared in a collection… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of George Puttenham
A long and influential treatise entitled The Arte of English Poesie, published anonymously in 1589, is attributed to George Puttenham (1529–1590, though the evidence for this is not conclusive and continues to be argued by scholars. Puttenham was educated at… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille(1606–1684), born in the French town of Rouen in Normandy, was primarily a playwright. Born into a middle-class family, and having failed in his initial endeavor as a lawyer, he launched into a stormy and controversial career in the… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
The French poet, satirist, and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) had a pervasive influence not only on French letters (of the old-fashioned kind) but also on English and German poets and critics. His L’Art Poétique (The Art of Poetry), first published… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was a pioneer in many respects. Because of her family circumstances and her husband’s early death, she was obliged to support herself as a writer – the first woman to do so. She is one of the… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope
An Essay on Criticism, published anonymously by Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in 1711, is perhaps the clearest statement of neoclassical principles in any language. In its broad outlines, it expresses a worldview which synthesizes elements of a Roman Catholic outlook with… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson
Of his numerous achievements, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) is perhaps best remembered for his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755. Of almost equal renown are his Lives of the English Poets (1783) and his eight-volume edition of Shakespeare… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was the first major American writer explicitly to advocate the autonomy of poetry, the freeing of poetry from moral or educational or intellectual imperatives. His fundamental strategy for perceiving such autonomy was to view poetry not as… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson (1803–1882), the most articulate exponent of American Romanticism, was a poet; but he was distinguished primarily by his contributions to literary and cultural criticism. He was the leading advocate of American “transcendentalism” with its insistence on the value of… Read More ›
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Romanticism in America
The French Revolution of 1789 marked a watershed for the future of Europe, a fact keenly discerned by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Irving Babbitt and Matthew Arnold. Not only did that Revolution initiate the political… Read More ›
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Romanticism in France
One of the founders of Romanticism, its so-called father, was the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who espoused a return to nature and equated the increasing growth and refinement of civilization with corruption, artificiality, and mechanization. Rousseau’s Social Contract espouses democratic… Read More ›
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Romanticism in Germany
During the 1760s and 1770s, Germany witnessed the rise of the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement in which writers and critics such as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Goethe, and Schiller experimented with new subjective modes of expression… Read More ›
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Romanticism in England
In England, the ground for Romanticism was prepared in the latter half of the eighteenth century through the economic, political, and cultural transformations mentioned in the preceding chapters. The system of absolute government crumbled even earlier in Britain than elsewhere;… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of S.T. Coleridge
The genius of Samuel Taylor Coleridge extended over many domains. In poetry he is best known for compositions such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Frost at Midnight, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, as well as Lyrical Ballads (1798), which he co-authored… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth
It was Wordsworth who wrote the following famous lines about the French Revolution as it first appeared to many of its sympathizers: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven! O times,… Read More ›
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Agenda Setting Media Theory
The argument that television news and other genres such as documentaries and current affairs straightforwardly transmit an obviously biased view of the world has been rejected in most quarters of media studies. Nevertheless, while the majority acknowledge that television has… Read More ›
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Shame, Guilt, Empathy, and the Search for Identity in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Among other things, tragedy dramatizes identity crises. At the root of such crises lie feelings of shame. You might ask: what about guilt? There is no question that guilt plays a major role in tragedy, but tragedy also dramatizes the… Read More ›
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Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and the Poetry of War
1 In The Owl, written in February 1915, three months before he enlisted, Edward Thomas characteristically sets himself on the open road: walking at night feeling hungry, cold and tired. When he enters an inn, though, the exterior world is… Read More ›
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Body Language in Harold Pinter’s Plays
In the millennium year, Harold Pinter reached his seventieth birthday. Looking back over his achievements (as actor, pacifist, playwright, poet, critic, director, creator-adaptor of scripts that have sensitively translated the artistry of novelists into the medium of film, campaigner for… Read More ›
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Violence in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry
hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity (The Grauballe Man) If, as Seamus Heaney says, quoting Borges, ‘poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on pages’,1 then we might recognise… Read More ›
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Female Characters in Eugene O’Neill’s Plays
Like many other male writers, Eugene O’Neill created a world populated primarily by men. From the sea plays at the beginning of his career to such late works as The Iceman Cometh and Hughie, men dominate his theatrical space. A… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of John Dryden
John Dryden (1631–1700) occupies a seminal place in English critical history. Samuel Johnson called him “the father of English criticism,” and affirmed of his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) that “modern English prose begins here.” Dryden’s critical work was extensive, treating… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) is often cited as an archetype of the well-rounded “Renaissance man”: his talents were multifold, encompassing not only poetry and cultivated learning but also the virtues of statesmanship and military service. He was born into an aristocratic… Read More ›
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Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism
While he was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Greenblatt helped to found a journal called Representations, in which some of the earlier important New Historicist criticism appeared. As mentioned earlier, however, it was his introduction to The Power… Read More ›
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Walter Pater and Aestheticism
Walter Pater (1839–1894) is best known for his phrase “art for art’s sake.” In his insistence on artistic autonomy, on aesthetic experience as opposed to aesthetic object, and on experience in general as an ever vanishing flux, he is a… Read More ›
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Symbolism, Aestheticism and Charles Baudelaire
Known as the founder of French symbolism (though not himself part of the movement), and often associated with the artistic decadence and aestheticism of the later nineteenth century, Baudelaire was born in Paris where he lived a bohemian life, adopting… Read More ›
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Postmodern British Poetry
If the era of ‘postmodernity’ is increasingly seen as ‘a socio-economic mode that has intensified and surpassed modernity itself’ then poetry produced under this new ‘socio-economic mode’ might rightly be dismissed as another form of ‘postmodern’ candyfloss neatly packaged for… Read More ›
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Psychoanalytic Reading of Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared
Kafka’s first novel, The Man who Disappeared (Der Verschollene), still better known in the English-speaking world at least under Max Brod’s title, Amerika, is set against the realist backdrop of the most modern and technologically advanced society in the world,… Read More ›
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Experimental Form in Victorian Poetry
In 1844, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wanted to write “a poem of a new class,” one that included “[conversations & events” and “philosophical dreaming & digression.”1 She also wanted to purify George Gordon Byron‘s sexually contentious poetry, to write “a Don Juan,… Read More ›
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Gender Matters: The Women in Donne’s Poems
For Donne as for us, gender matters, deeply, passionately, disturbingly. Donne is constantly writing about women and gender roles, both explicitly and indirectly through analogy and metaphor. Yet unlike his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Donne rarely… Read More ›
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SET QUESTION PAPERS
To view Previous 9 Years Kerala State Eligibility Test Question Papers – 36 Subjects Click here www.lbscentre.info/set/questions.htm (PDF) To View SET English Question Papers, Click on the Hyperlink 2010 SET 2010 2011 SET 2011 2012 SET 2012 2013 SET 2013 2013 December 2013 dec 2015 June… Read More ›
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HSST 2017 Syllabus
Download PDF HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHER HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHER – ENGLISH (JUNIOR) HSST SYLLABUS PART I MODULE I – CHAUCER TO NEO CLASSICISM Poetry • Geoffrey Chaucer “The Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales • Edmund Spenser “Prothalamion” • William Shakespeare… Read More ›
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UGC CBSE NET ENGLISH EXAM NOVEMBER 2017 ANSWER KEY
PAPER II ENGLISH CODE N03017 UGC CBSE NET ENGLISH EXAM NOVEMBER 2017 ANSWER KEY PAPER III ENGLISH CODE N03017 UGC CBSE NET ENGLISH EXAM NOVEMBER 2017 ANSWER KE1 All attempts have been made to prepare the answer key without errors. If… Read More ›
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Phenomenology
Phenomenology refers to a cluster of approaches to philosophical and sociological enquiry and to the study of art, deriving from the work of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). The diversity of approaches that have been described as phenomenology, not… Read More ›
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Gender Stereotype
The concept of a stereotype was introduced into social science in 1922, when Walter Lippman used it to describe the ‘typical picture’ that comes to mind when thinking about a particular social group (Macrae et al. 1996). A stereotype can… Read More ›
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Masculinity/ Masculinities
Masculinity is the set of social practices and cultural representations associated with being a man. The plural ‘masculinities’ is also used in recognition that ways of being a man and cultural representations of/about men vary, both historically and culturally, between… Read More ›
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Men’s Movements/ Men’s Studies
Men’s movements emerged at the time of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the groupings gathered together under this umbrella title were as heterogeneous as early radical feminist groups. In a sense they all seemed to be a reaction to… Read More ›
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Heterosexism
The word ‘heterosexism’ derives directly from the feminist creation of the term ‘sexism’ during the late 1960s. The first usage of the term heterosexism is given as 1979 by the Oxford English Dictionary and it is defined as ‘prejudice and… Read More ›
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Gender Order
The gender order is a patterned system of ideological and material practices, performed by individuals in a society, through which power relations between women and men are made, and remade, as meaningful. It is through the gender order of a… Read More ›
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Psycholinguistics: An Essay
Psycholinguistics is concerned with the relationship between language and the mind. This distinguishes it from sociolinguistics, on the one hand, where the focus is on the social dimension of language, and stylistics, on the other, where it is on the… Read More ›
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Assemblage and Asseblage Theory
“Assemblage” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to counter all claims to presence or center in favor of the many material ways that objects come together over time. As they explain in A Thousand Plateaus (1987),… Read More ›
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Third Wave Feminism
Third wave feminism has numerous definitions, but perhaps is best described in the most general terms as the feminism of a younger generation of women who acknowledge the legacy of second wave feminism, but also identify what they see as… Read More ›
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Second Wave Feminism
Second wave feminism is a term used to describe a new period of feminist collective political activism and militancy which emerged in the late 1960s. The concept of ‘waves’ of feminism was itself only applied in the late 1960s and… Read More ›
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First Wave Feminism
The historical development of feminism (especially in Britain and the USA) is commonly divided into several key periods, some characterised by a relative absence of feminist thought and mobilisation, and others by the sustained growth both of feminist criticism and… Read More ›
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Identity Politics/ the Politics of Identity
The utopian vision of ‘sisterhood’ – the collecting together of all women under the same political banner – was in part responsible for the burgeoning interest in feminism and the emergent Women’s Liberation Movement. It was inevitably going to come… Read More ›
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Post-Feminism: An Essay
It must first be stated that there is no agreement about how postfeminism can be defined and consequently definitions essentially contradict each other in what they say about the term. At its most straightforward, the prefix ‘post’ in this context… Read More ›
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Lesbian Continuum: A Brief Note
The ‘lesbian continuum’ was a phrase coined by Adrienne Rich in her pathfinding essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980, reprinted in Rich 1986). Rich’s notion of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ here extends the definition of lesbian beyond that of sexual identity… Read More ›
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The Other, The Big Other, and Othering
Critical theorists are particularly committed to opposing binary oppositions where one side is seen as privileged over or defining itself against an Other (often capitalized), for example, male/female, Occident/Orient, center/margin. Through such binary oppositions, Homi Bhabha explains, “The Other loses… Read More ›
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Postcolonial Magical Realism
The majority of magical realist writing can be described as postcolonial. That is to say much of it is set in a postcolonial context and written from a postcolonial perspective that challenges the assumptions of an authoritative colonialist attitude. As… Read More ›
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Introduction to Comics Studies
Although both film and comics in their currently recognized forms emerged in the nineteenth century, film acquired much earlier critical academic recognition, even though as early as the 1830s the comic strip began to distinguish itself from already established fields… Read More ›
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Introduction to Whiteness Studies
Whiteness studies investigates the parameters of white racial identity, locating its scope and function in systems of representation. This field of study takes as its founding premise the constructed nature of identity, a poststructuralist concept heralded by race theorists who… Read More ›
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Hegemony
Hegemony, initially a term referring to the dominance of one state within a confederation, is now generally understood to mean domination by consent. This broader meaning was coined and popularized in the 1930s by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who investigated… Read More ›
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Glocalization
First popularized in the English-speaking world by the British sociologist Roland Robertson in the 1990s, and later developed by Zygmunt Bauman, the term ‘glocal’ and the process noun ‘glocalization’ are formed by blending the words ‘global’ and ‘local’. Both terms… Read More ›
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Fanonism
A term for the anti-colonial liberationist critique formulated by the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). Fanon’s work in Algeria led him to become actively involved in the Algerian liberation movement and to publish a number of foundational works on racism… Read More ›
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Ecofeminism
Ecofeminism has become an increasingly important field in both contemporary feminist and environmental studies. Although, as Diamond and Orenstein note, ecofeminism is really ‘a new term for an ancient wisdom’ (Mies and Shiva 1993: 13), it first came to prominence… Read More ›
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Decolonization
Decolonization is the process of revealing and dismantling colonialist power in all its forms. This includes dismantling the hidden aspects of those institutional and cultural forces that had maintained the colonialist power and that remain even after political independence is… Read More ›
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Paul Gilroy and His Theory of Black Atlantic
The term Black Atlantic was employed first by the Black British critic Paul Gilroy (Gilroy 1993). In that study, he addressed the cultural and historical linkages, which unified the peoples of African descent on both sides of the ocean that… Read More ›
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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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Anthropological Criticism: An Essay
Anthropological criticism refers, broadly speaking, to a form of criticism that situates the making, dissemination and reception of literature within the conventions and cultural practices of human societies. Such an undertaking has become increasingly suspect in the twentieth century as… Read More ›
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Sigmund Freud and the Trauma Theory
Although Sigmund Freud himself inaugurated this field of study, he subsequently abandoned it. Early in his career, he assumed that a history of sexual seduction in childhood was responsible for the neurotic symptoms he Feminist criticism and psychoanalysis observed in… Read More ›
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The Literary Criticism of Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), English poet, literary critic, and essayist, perceived reformative tendencies accompanying the burgeoning development of industrial society in nineteenth-century England that threatened the wavering hegemonic apparatus of secular and ecclesiastical order, and hindered the appreciation and expression of… Read More ›
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Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt
German born (although naturalised American) political philosopher, who contributed significantly to the analysis of totalitarianism, and the fate of Jewry in the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is perhaps best known for a single utterance, her response to the Nazi… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Theodor Adorno
German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist who was a leading member (and eventually director) of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (the institutional basis of the Frankfurt School of German critical theory), Theodor Adorno’s (1903-1969) work may be understood as an… Read More ›
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The Sociology of Norbert Elias
German-born sociologist, who held academic posts in Germany, the United Kingdom, Ghana and the Netherlands, Norbert Elias‘s (1897-1990) approach to sociological inquiry is characterised by the use of highly detailed historical study, so that even theoretical questions are addressed in… Read More ›
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Cultural Anthropology of Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz’s (1926- 2006) work defined the field of interpretive social science, and he is regarded as one of the most influential and widely cited American cultural anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century. He has championed interpretative approaches to… Read More ›
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The Sociology of Anthony Giddens
Anthony Giddens (1938- ) is a British sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists, the author of at least… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams (1921-1988), Welsh cultural critic, who was a major forerunner of contemporary Cultural Studies. Books such as Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) served to map out much that is now taken as the basic… Read More ›
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The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Austrian-born philosopher. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) originally studied engineering. In 1912, he went to Cambridge and became a student of one of the founders of the analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell (1872—1970). Wittgenstein served in the Austrian army during the First World… Read More ›
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The Sociology of Georg Simmel
A German philosopher and sociologist, Georg Simmel (1858-1918) is frequently cited as one of the founders of sociology. His work is at times impressionistic, covering a wide range of issues and ideas. His most consistent and rigorous development of a… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Jean-Paul Sartre
French philosopher, novelist and playwright, who was in many respects the model of a politically engaged intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was offered, but refused, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 . An indication of the esteem in which he was… Read More ›