For many years, discourse analysis was less an explicit “theory” than a practical and empirical approach for supporting field work on relatively little-recorded languages and cultures (see, e.g., Grimes, Longacre, Malinowski, Pike). One domain of early work that attracted notice… Read More ›
In 1982 Stephen Greenblatt edited a special issue of Genre on Renaissance writing, and in his introduction to this volume he claimed that the articles he had solicited were engaged in a joint enterprise, namely, an effort to rethink the… Read More ›
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 ›
Since the late 1980s, theories of Gender and Sexuality have redefined how we think about culture and society. They have raised new questions about the construction of the gendered and sexualized subject and put forward radical new ideas about PERFORMANCE… Read More ›
Like feminist, critical race, and queer approaches to literature and culture, disability studies relates to a specific group: in this case, disabled people, who make up approximately 15 percent of the world population and are among the most poor and… Read More ›
Surveillance studies is new. That is to say, until very recently something called surveillance studies did not exist. People studied surveillance, but in isolated, piecemeal and unsystematic ways. Over the past 20 years or so, surveillance has become an increasingly… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Postcolonialism is characterized by the rejection of Western universalism and political imperialism, soon after independence gained by Asian and African countries, and an awareness that the colonizer’s language is permanently tainted and to write in it involves a subjugation to… Read More ›
One of the prominent books of the Postmodern era, on par with Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species, Marx‘ Das Capital and Freud‘s Interpretation of Dreams, Edward Said‘s Orientalism (1978) inaugurated postcolonial theory. Appearing at the same time as the… Read More ›
Although the interrogation of power on a wider scale is implicit in Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism- the belief that language provides access to truth — the interest in power and its workings that dominates the poststructuraiist criticism of the 1980s… Read More ›
Michel Foucault, best known for his critical studies of social institutions, such as psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison systems as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality, has been tremendously influential on postmodern… Read More ›
Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern… Read More ›
The advent of critical theory in the post-war period, which comprised various complex disciplines like linguistics, literary criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Structuralism, Postcolonialism etc., proved hostile to the liberal consensus which reigned the realm of criticism between the 1930s and `50s. Among… Read More ›
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