Author Archives
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The Influence of Poststructuralism on Feminism
With the arrival of Poststructuralism on the critical scene, Feminism emerged as more eclectic and expanded its horizons to merge into the realms of other contemporary theories, thus giving rise to a plethora of rampant and dynamically developing areas such… Read More ›
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Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics
Kate Millett was the first notable feminist after Simone de Beauvoir to address the construction of woman within male writing. According to Millett, the man-woman relationship is deeply embedded in power structures with political implications – thus she derived the… Read More ›
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The Feminist Dictum “the Personal is the Political”
A frequently heard feminist rallying cry, especially during the late 1960s and 1970s, and a central doctrine of the second-wave feminists, who used its underlying meaning in their writings, speeches, consciousness-rising, and other other activities, the concept “the personal is… Read More ›
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Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir‘s The Second Sex (1949) can be said to have inaugurated the second wave of feminism, with its central argument that throughout history, across cultures, woman has always occupied a secondary position in relation to man, being relegated… Read More ›
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Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contribution to Feminism
The 18th century British writer Mary Wollstonecraft‘s advocacy of women’s equality and critiques of conventional feminity have been significant in the development of feminism. Influenced by European Enlightenment, Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)… Read More ›
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Feminism: An Essay
Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman… Read More ›
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Carl Jung’s Contribution to Psychoanalytic Theory
A philosopher, psychoanalyst and a disciple of Freud, CG Jung treated the human self as the totality of all psychic processes considering the Freudian concept of individual consciousness as incomplete and unnecessarily negative, Jung proposed a second and far deeper… Read More ›
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Lacan’s Concept of Mirror Stage
Lacan‘s reinterpretation of Freud, with the central focus on language, brought about a post-structuralist turn to psychoanalytic theory. In his paper titled Mirror Stage (1949), Lacan expounds the concept of the mirror stage that occurs between 6-18 months of a child’s development, when… Read More ›
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Jacques Lacan’s Reinterpretation of Freud
Jacques Lacan, who is often referred to as the “French Freud” transposed Freudian concepts into the realm of Saussurean structural linguistics, focussing on the operations of the process of signification, instead of the human mind as such. Lacanian reading attempted… Read More ›
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Feminist Critique of Freud
Freud had been widely discredited by early second wave feminists including Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. Millett, in particular, had persuasively argued that Freudian theory worked to perpetuate sexual difference and reinforce the belief that inferiority was… Read More ›
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Freud’s Critique of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Freued’s theory of Oedipus Complex is best demonstrated in his analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Oedipus complex is the strong affinity that the child develops for his mother in its intense urge to possess the mother, wishes to kill the father…. Read More ›
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Lacanian Psychoanalysis
The aura created by the Freudian interpretations reached its zenith when the French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (propelled into this arena by his reading of Freud and Salvador Dali) achieved a place in the literary critical canon. The linguistic, philosophical and… Read More ›
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Freudian Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic criticism (emerged in the 1960s), the most influential interpretative theory among the series of waves in the post war period is based on the specific premises of the workings of the mind, the instincts and sexuality, developed by the… Read More ›
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Culture Industry
The Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer produced an incisive critique of modern culture through their work The Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which they introduced the term “Culture industry,” to describe mass cultural forms which, in the wake… Read More ›
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Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
While lauding 19th century Realism, Lukacs attacked modernist experimental writers as “decadent” instances of concern with the subjectivity of the alienated individual in the fragmented world of our late stage of capitalism. He thereby inaugurated a vigorous debate among Marxist… Read More ›
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Fredric Jameson as a Neo-Marxist Critic
Fredric Jameson outlined a dialectic theory of literary criticism in his Marxism and Form (1971), drawing on Hegelian categories such as the notion of totality and the connections of abstract and concrete. Such criticism recognises the need to see its… Read More ›
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Terry Eagleton and Marxist Literary Criticism
Terence Francis Eagleton (b: 1943), a student of Raymond Williams, is a literary theorist, and since the 1970s, widely regarded as the most influential British Marxist critic. He has written more than forty books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983),… Read More ›
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Raymond Williams as a Marxist Literary Theorist
Raymond Williams (1921-1988) is the most influential Marxist critics of the twentieth century, and one of the leading figures of the New Left. His work with the journal New Left Review and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies laid… Read More ›
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Georg Lukacs as a Marxist Literary Theorist
The Hungarian thinker and aesthetician Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) has played a pivotal role in the development of Western Marxism, which refers to a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and central Europe. The Western Marxists are in opposition… Read More ›
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Louis Althusser: ISA and RSA
Althusser is a structuralist Marxist. This should make you ask: How can that be? How can you combine Marxism, which relies on social/historical analysis, with structuralism, which relies on ahistorical/asocial analysis? Althusser answers that initially with distinction between ideologies (historical/social)… Read More ›
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