Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was born in Poiters, France, the second child of Anne Malapert and Paul Foucault. It was expected that he, like his father, would study and practice medicine. The Second World War disrupted education in France, however, and… Read More ›
Foucault
Queer Culture
The term queer has often puzzled outsiders.Why call yourself that? This too has its story. For a long time queerwas, of course, a derogatory term for male homosexuals. That began to change when it began to be widely used in… Read More ›
Key Theories of Judith Butler
Judith Butler (b.1956) received a PhD in philosophy from Yale in 1984, with a thesis on Hegelian influences in France. She is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at… Read More ›
Key Theories of Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben (b.1942) is a philosopher of Italian origin who, since the World Trade Centre attacks in September 2001, has challenged the wide use of emergency measures for people control. Indeed, while en route to give lectures at New York University… Read More ›
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. However, it was his introduction to The Power of Forms in… Read More ›
Foucault’s Influence on New Historicism
The anti-establishment ethos of New Historicism wasprofoundly influenced by Foucault‘s theories of Power/Knowledge and Discourse. Foucault observed that the discourse of an era brings into being concepts, oppositions and hierarchies, which are products and propagators of power, and these determine… Read More ›
New Historicism’s Deviation from Old Historicism
New Historicism envisages and practises a mode of study where the literary text and the non-literary cotext are given “equal weighting”, whereas old historicism considers history as a “background” of facts to the “foreground” of literature. While Old historicism follows… Read More ›
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