bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Eco‐Criticism
Authors: Garrard Greg
Published: May 2017

Eco‐criticism is the most popular term for the study of literature and culture from a perspective informed by environmental politics or scientific ecology, although some critics prefer the terms “environmental criticism” (Lawrence Buell), “ecocritique” (Tim Luke), or “ecopoetics” (Jonathan Bate). Just as feminist critics share a moral and political commitment to women's liberation in spite of their theoretical disagreements, all eco‐critics are motivated by an acute sense of the threats to natural environments from human population levels, unconstrained technological development, the ecological consequences of both wealth and poverty, and ideologies considered hostile to environmentalism, such as consumerism, Christianity, and patriarchy. Although analysis of culture may seem remote from the urgency of climate change, one of the founders of the eco‐critical movement in America, Cheryll Glotfelty, argues that “[i]f we're not part of the solution, we're part of the problem” (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996: xx–xxi).
Ethical Criticism
Authors: Eaglestone Robert
Published: May 2017

The term “ethical criticism” does not refer to a school or critical approach, but rather to an upsurge of interest in the relationship between ethics, literature, criticism, and theory since the late 1990s, often called the “turn to ethics.” However, in some ways this term is misleading, since the study of literature has always had a strong involvement with ethics since its inception and vigorous arguments have taken place as to how that involvement should be understood. The recent turn to ethics in literary studies stems from two very distinct approaches and, as such, can be divided into two very different (and sometimes opposing) camps. Both of these camps developed in relation to the growth of theory in the 1970s and ‘80s, and both offer different histories of that development and different ways of understanding the relationship between ethics and literature.
Evolutionary Studies
Authors: Carroll Joseph
Published: May 2017

Evolutionary literary scholars, commonly called “literary Darwinists,” use concepts from evolutionary biology and the evolutionary human sciences to formulate principles of literary theory and interpret literary texts. They investigate interactions between “human nature” and the forms of cultural imagination, including literature and its oral antecedents. By “human nature,” they mean a pan‐human, genetically transmitted set of dispositions: motives, emotions, features of personality, and forms of cognition. Because the Darwinists concentrate on relations between genetically transmitted dispositions and specific cultural configurations, they often describe their work as “biocultural critique.”
Feminism
Authors: Garner Katie , Munford Rebecca
Published: May 2017

Feminism describes the campaigns, activities, and texts concerned with challenging and transforming how women are treated and represented in society. It is a political movement and discourse that encompasses a diverse range of perspectives, theories, and methods. As well as analyzing patriarchal structures, feminist theory seeks to propose new ways for women to bring about social change. This drive underlies much feminist activity, from public campaigns for new political rights, to the search for a new “feminine” writing. Current Anglo‐American models often conceptualize the history of Western feminism in terms of three movements, or “waves.” The first wave of activity dates from the end of the eighteenth century through to the beginning of collective female political action in the form of the Suffragette and New Women's movements in Britain and the US, and the granting of partial (1918) and full (1928) franchise for women in Britain. The 1960s signal the beginnings of the “second wave,” when women collectively campaigned on a broad range of issues including sexual health and contraception, pornography, domestic abuse, and gender discrimination in the workplace. This chapter of feminist theory is marked by the emergence of three different models of feminist politics: liberal feminism, which focuses on achieving full equality and opportunities within existing social structures; radical feminism, which is revolutionary rather than reformative in its conviction that creating alternative, woman‐centered institutions and realities will bring about social change; and socialist feminism, which sees “femaleness” and “femininity” as socially and historically contingent, and is concerned with the economic and cultural contexts of women's oppression. Following the decline of organized second‐wave activities in the 1980s, different accounts of feminism from black and Third World women began to readdress the First World bias of the first and second waves. These differing positions, alongside developments in the fields of gender studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and postmodernism, inform third‐wave feminism, which accordingly takes a more global and plural view of the relationship between power and subjectivity.
G
ates,
H
enry
L
ouis
Authors: Lewis Jennifer
Published: May 2017

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is a major figure in African American literary studies, a critic who has, since the 1980s, had a profound influence upon the ways in which African American literature has been studied and taught. His main interests have been the recovering, editing, and publishing of previously overlooked African American texts, and the development of what he has called indigenous literary criticism. As an editor Gates has published major anthologies that have brought African American texts to a wide audience (e.g., Gates & Appiah 1986; Gates & McKay 1997). He has also authenticated and assisted in the publication of two early novels: Harriet Wilson's
Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
, and Hannah Craft's
The Bondswoman's Narrative
. As a critic Gates has authored several major works of literary criticism, developing formal literary theories through which to read black texts (e.g. Gates 1987; 1988b).
L
acoue‐
L
abarthe,
P
hilippe
Authors: James Ian
Published: May 2017

The philosophical writing of Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe (1940–2007) engages with many of the key preoccupations of late twentieth‐century French thought: the relation of literature to philosophy and the uncertain status of philosophical subjectivity; questions of representation and mimesis in relation to art, the political, and history; the identity of meaning and of the individual self. Consisting largely of meticulous commentaries on philosophers, artists, and poets, Lacoue‐Labarthe's writing situates itself clearly within a tradition which emerges in the wake of the speculative idealism of the German Enlightenment (principally Kant and Hegel) and the artistic legacy of Romanticism. In particular his writing has focused on the question of the subject within post‐Enlightenment thought and aesthetics and the relation of philosophical conceptions of subjectivity to political forms, and to determinate historical and political events (e.g., the place of Nazism and the extermination camps in relation to wider European culture and history).
L
evinas,
E
mmanuel
Authors: Roderick Nemonie Craven
Published: May 2017

The Lithuanian‐born French philosopher and Jewish scholar Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) has come to be regarded as a central figure in the history of twentieth‐century French philosophy, particularly in the areas of phenomenology and ethics, although his influence is now to be found in literary and film theory – despite the suspicions about “the aesthetic element” he raises in his essay “Reality and its shadow” (1989[1948]) and elsewhere – and in other diverse fields. His description of human subjectivity and its formation in an encounter with “the Other” of ethics has been attractive to those seeking to decenter human experience, in order to complicate an understanding of subjectivity as, in Levinas's words, “home” or as “conquest and jealous defense” (1981). Levinas's thinking of “alterity” is pitched against what he describes as ontology's totalizing grip on philosophy. “The Other” is a common translation of Levinas's
l'Autre
or
Autrui
, although his own use of terms and capitalization is inconsistent, as part of a refusal to “thematize” his work. This refusal of thematization is made manifest, structurally, in the metonymic chains through which Levinas seeks to rehabilitate philosophical terms such as “truth” (1981). An important interlocutor was Jacques Derrida, whose essay “Violence and metaphysics” (1978[1964]), constituted a major response to Levinas's
Totality and Infinity
(1969 [1961]) – one that in many ways shaped Levinas's later work.
L
yotard,
J
ean‐
F
rançois
Authors: Malpas Simon
Published: May 2017

Jean‐Francois Lyotard (1925–98) was a French political philosopher, art critic, and cultural theorist who became best known in the English‐speaking world for having been one of the key thinkers to define and advocate postmodernism.
M
arxism
Authors: Grindon Gavin , Ryan Michael
Published: May 2017

Marxism is the intellectual and political movement founded by Karl Marx (1818–83). The socialist and communist movements, which seek to bring about economic equality and a fairer distribution of wealth, antedated Marx, but he gave them a sense of intellectual coherence in his major works (some co‐authored with Friedrich Engels) –
The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology
, and
Capital
. Marx also provided the basis for a “Marxist” literary and cultural theory in his theory of ideology, in which he famously proclaimed that the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. Later theorists would also draw on his reworking of Hegel's dialectical method of analysis to describe the complex ways culture both reflects reality and prefigures new versions of social life.
M
iller,
J. H
illis
Authors: Eaglestone Robert
Published: May 2017

J. Hillis Miller (b. 1928) is an American critic, specializing in Victorian and modern literature, as well as in American and European literature of the past two centuries. He was closely aligned, first, to phenomenological criticism or “criticism of consciousness,” and then, after 1968, to deconstruction. He was a key member of the Yale School.
Mimicry
Authors: Morton Stephen
Published: May 2017

Mimicry in its conventional sense is the action, practice, or art of copying or closely imitating, or reproducing through mime (OED). In this definition, mimicry is closely related to mimesis or the practice of representation in literature, performance, and the visual arts. Yet in contrast to mimesis, which often seeks to reproduce an image of the object that is being copied, mimicry can have a humorous and even subversive potential that deliberately sets out to challenge the meaning of the object that is being copied or represented. This is not to say that the act or practice of imitation is restricted to literature and the visual arts, however, since the imitation of other human beings is also one of the formative processes through which children learn to speak, act, and perform as socialized human subjects. Furthermore, in biology, the practice of mimicry denotes the close external resemblance of an animal or plant to another, or to an inanimate object
(OED)
, in some instances as a tactic of self‐defense.
Modernity/Postmodernity
Authors: Malpas Simon
Published: May 2017

The terms “modernity” and “postmo‐dernity” are used by critics to designate the ways in which particular historical periods identify themselves and their relations with the past and future. Rather than focusing solely on simple historical chronology, modernity and postmodernity are used to refer to and encompass analyses of the dominant philosophical, social, artistic, and political practices and beliefs of each period; in short, the worldviews generated by them. The two terms almost always occur together, with critics tending to present arguments in favor of one over the other. Despite the comparatively wide use of the two terms, there is little overall consensus about the precise dates of the periods they cover or the defining social, cultural, and intellectual features of either category. Different definitions of and arguments about modernity and postmodernity produced by competing theories and thinkers, however, frequently reveal important things about the political and philosophical premises of the particular critical stance each one has adopted.
Narratology and Structuralism
Authors: Wake Paul
Published: May 2017

Narratology is a formalist‐structuralist attempt to theorize and define the nature of narrative. The term itself was introduced in 1969 by Bulgarian‐born naturalized French literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, whose description of “narratologie” as “la science du récit [the science of narrative]” (1969: 10) is a clear indication of the “scientific” aspirations evinced by narratology in its early manifestations.
N
egri,
A
ntonio and
H
ardt,
M
ichael
Authors: Trott Ben
Published: May 2017

Antonio Negri (b. 1933) is an Italian political philosopher best known today for the
Empire, Multitude
, and
Commonwealth
trilogy, authored with the American literary theorist and philosopher Michael Hardt (b. 1960). Negri was born in Padua, northern Italy. At the age of 25, he completed his doctoral dissertation on German historicism in the field of “state doctrine” or “state theory” broadly speaking, the philosophy of law at the University of Padua where he became a professor shortly after.
New Aestheticism
Authors: Joughin John J.
Published: May 2017

The “new aestheticism” is a literary critical and theoretical movement which is made up of a number of important contemporary thinkers who argue that focusing on the specifically aesthetic impact of a work of art or literature has the potential to open radically different ways of thinking about identity, politics, and culture.
New Critical Theory
Authors: Wilson Ross
Published: May 2017

New critical theory describes the type of criticism employed by contemporary thinkers working in and with the legacy of the influential “Frankfurt School” of philosophers and critics. Critical theory, in this sense, is perhaps unusual in having an institutional base namely, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. The institutional continuity of critical theory, broken only by World War II and the exile from Europe of most of the members of the “Frankfurt School,” does not necessarily indicate a straight path from the institute's establishment to its contemporary form. Writing in 2004, the current head of the institute, Axel Honneth, remarked that a gulf has opened up between contemporary thinkers in the tradition of critical theory and their predecessors, especially Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse:
Phallus/Phallocentrism
Authors: Rine Abigail
Published: May 2017

In psychoanalytic theory, the phallus serves as the supreme symbol of masculine power and, concurrently, of feminine lack. “Phallocentrism” is a term used primarily by feminist theorists to denote the pervasive privileging of the masculine within the current system of signification.
Presentism
Authors: Robson Mark
Published: May 2017

Presentism as a practice has emerged from literary critical forms of historicism. Where historicism primarily stresses the connections between a literary text and the moment and context of its original production, presentism instead emphasizes the moment of reading, production, or performance in a broad sense. Skeptical about the claims for the precedence of an original version of a text, or an original moment determinative of its meaning in a decisive fashion, presentism refuses to privilege one instantiation of a text over another, instead emphasizing its pertinence at the moment in which the critic writes. While there may be the appearance of antagonism here, historicism and presentism are best thought of as rival forms of contextual criticism, and there is no simple opposition between them.
Psychoanalysis (since 1966)
Authors: Moore Gerald
Published: May 2017

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) developed psychoanalysis around a predominantly biological model of the drives of the human organism, and his desire to see it recognized as a medical science saw him steer clear of philosophical discourse. Psychoanalysis also made its mark primarily as a science of “family romance,” the Oedipus complex of incestuous desire, and as such, arguably, had little to do with the public sphere of politics. A number of events occurring in and around the 1960s meant that this theoretical framework began to change. Critics internal and external to the psychoanalytic movement began to cast aspersions on both the scientific bases of psychoanalysis and on what Michel Foucault has called the “Victorian,” or conventional and conservative, nature of Freudian sexual morality. Assailed, on the one hand, by the emergent fields of the cognitive and social sciences and, on the other, by attempts to wed it to the sexual, political, and philosophical revolutions of the age, the orthodox Freudianism of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) became increasingly sidelined, riven by internal politics. Having survived the onslaughts of both Nazism and fascism, with their respective accusations of its being a “Jewish” and a “bourgeois” science, psychoanalysis has, ironically, gone on to suffer from the scientific and social sexual awakenings it helped to bring about.
S
aid,
E
dward
Authors: Bari Shahidha
Published: May 2017

Born in Jerusalem in 1935, the literary critic, campaigner, and postcolonial scholar, Edward Said, spent his early childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo, before studying in the United States at Princeton and Harvard universities. In 1963, he took up a professorship in comparative literature at Columbia University. From his father, a Protestant Palestinian with US citizenship, and his mother, who had been born in Nazareth, Said inherited a lasting attachment to the Middle East and he remained a committed campaigner for Palestinian rights throughout his life. For Said, the childhood experiences of displacement and deracination cultivated an adult sensitivity to cultural and political acts of exclusion and awakened in him the possibility of a resistant, exilic form of identity. These experiences informed Said's thinking and surface repeatedly in his work, most visibly in
Out of Place
, his memoir of an Arab childhood and an American education, which was awarded the New Yorker Book Award for Non‐Fiction in 1999. This biographical outing offered variations on the themes of exile and marginalization that run through Said's many works. A foundational thinker for postcolonial studies, Said became an internationally recognizable public intellectual. A prolific essayist, his work ranged across the fields of literature, politics, and music. His literary criticism considered the works of canonical writers such as Swift, Austen, and Conrad, as well as contemporary writers such as Soueif and Naipaul, while his musical criticism included meditations on Wagner, Verdi, and Gould. Said's writing reflects the broad span of his influences, which extend to the early Marxist criticism of Antonio Gramsci and Theodor Adorno, and the later poststructuralist theory of Michel Foucault. In 1999 he co‐founded the West‐Eastern Divan Orchestra with Israeli musician Daniel Barenboim. He was president of the Modern Languages Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Said's damning critique of the Western disfiguration of the “Orient,” his insistence on understanding aesthetic works in social and political contexts, and his conception of contrapuntal reading made a lasting contribution to modern literary theory. He died in 2003.
S
choles,
R
obert
Authors: Hughes Joe
Published: May 2017

Robert Scholes (b. 1929) has written more than 20 books on topics ranging from contemporary fiction and science fiction, to structuralism and the role of literary theory in the classroom, to the rise of literature as an academic discipline. He is best known for his work in twentieth‐century fiction and in particular for his concept of fabulation.
S
edgwick,
E
ve
K
osofsky
Authors: Kim Koonyong
Published: May 2017

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009) is best known as a key figure in queer theory. She was born in Dayton, Ohio and received her BA from Cornell University in 1971 and her PhD from Yale University in 1975. She taught at Hamilton College, Boston University, and Amherst College before moving to Duke University, where from 1988 to 1998 she, together with her colleagues Jonathan Goldberg and Michael Moon, helped to consolidate queer studies as a new paradigm of literary and cultural theory. On leaving Duke in 1998, she became Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
Self‐Referentiality
Authors: Burgoyne Daniel
Published: May 2017

Self‐referentiality occurs when something refers to itself, such as a statement or work of art that mentions or points to itself. At the simplest level, this occurs in ordinary speech when a person uses the first‐person pronoun (“I”). In postmodernism, self‐referentiality has been associated with the roles and limits of subjectivity and systematic knowledge.
Semiotics
Authors: Danesi Marcel
Published: May 2017

Semiotics is defined as the discipline studying and documenting signs, sign behavior, sign creation, and sign functions. It also comes under the rubric of semiology, significs, and even structuralist science, although semiotics is the designation adopted by the International Association of Semiotic Studies during its founding meeting in 1969 and, as a consequence, the most commonly used term. A sign is any physical form – a word, a picture, a sound, a symbol, etc. – that stands for something other than itself in some specific context. A cross figure, for instance, constitutes a sign because it stands for various things, such as “crossroads” and “Christianity.” It all depends on who uses it and in what context it is used. Today, semiotics is an autonomous discipline, but it has become a powerful cross‐disciplinary methodological tool in the study of such sign‐based phenomena as body language, aesthetic products, visual communication, media, advertising, narratives, material culture (fashion, cuisine, etc.), and rituals. One of its modern‐day founders, the Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure, defined it as the science concerned with “the role of signs as part of social life” and “the laws governing them” (1958[1916]: 15).
S
howalter,
E
laine
Authors: Munford Rebecca
Published: May 2017

Elaine Showalter (b. 1941) is an American feminist literary critic and historian who was an active member of the Women's Liberation Movement. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was educated at Bryn Mawr, Brandeis University, and the University of California, Davis. From 1967 to 1984 she taught English and women's studies at Rutgers University before becoming a Professor of English and, subsequently, Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. She is currently Professor Emeritus at Princeton, and is a past president of the Modern Language Association (MLA).
Social Constructionism
Authors: Greedharry Mrinalini
Published: May 2017

Social constructionism is an approach to the analysis of society that originated in the field of sociology, and takes its starting point from the idea that the human reality people experience as objectively true is a socially constructed reality. This is a view which seems commonplace in a postmodern world, but should be understood in its original context as an attempt to theorize specifically how human beings produce the world they inhabit in relation to their biological limits. The foundational book of social constructionism is
The Social Construction of Reality
by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, which was first published in 1966 and intended as a theoretical contribution to the subdiscipline of the sociology of knowledge.
Subject Position
Authors: Mansfield Nick
Published: May 2017

The question of the living self, its origins, nature and relationship to the social, cultural and political contexts in which it arises, has been one of the defining themes of modernity. What does the word “I” actually mean? Philosophical modernity is commonly dated from the division by the French philosopher René Descartes of the world between the subject, the thing that thinks, on the one hand, and the multidimensional world of objectivity that is thought about, on the other, between, in short, subject and object. Modernity was founded, then, on the primacy of thinking consciousness and the unified human self. The interrogation of the “modern,” commonly denoted as “postmodernity,” took as one of its key focuses the questioning of the reality of this individual thinking consciousness, taking the lead from modernist artists, from Arthur Rimbaud to performance art, who saw the self as a fiction, an encumbrance, or even a cruel political device. Indeed, the will to dislocate, deconstruct or destroy coherent human subjectivity is one of the dominant experiments in recent philosophy and culture.
T
el
Q
uel
Authors: Mowitt John
Published: May 2017

Tel Quel
, a French journal founded in 1960 and disbanded in 1982, played a major role in the promotion of writers and ideas associated first with structuralism and poststructuralism. The director, Philippe Sollers, was himself an accomplished postmodern writer, and his wife and fellow editorial board member, Julia Kristeva, was a major literary theorist and critic. Tel Quel was not strictly an academic journal, although academics served on its various editorial boards and its readership fell largely within the academic intelligentsia. Sollers never held an academic post, and he understood the project of the journal as a sustained challenge to the prevailing academic consensus in such fields as literary study, art history, philosophy, political science, and psychoanalysis. Tel Quel became two journals over time. Beginning in 1982, Tel Quel became
L'Infini
, a journal with similar ambitions to those of Tel Quel that remains in publication to this day. During its heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s, Tel Quel helped spawn several other journals in the humanities and social sciences, such as
Change
and
Cahiers pour l'Analyse
. The book series at Seuil, Collection
Tel Quel
(inaugurated in 1962), published some of the most important monographs of the period such as
Théorie d'ensemble
(1968), which first introduced Russian formalism and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to France, as well as germinal books by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva that were highly influential in Anglo‐American literary and cultural theory.
Y
ale
S
chool
Authors: Mcquillan Martin
Published: May 2017

The “Yale School” is the term commonly used to describe the work of five outstanding scholars – Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller – located in the departments of French and Comparative Literature, and of English, at Yale University between 1972 and 1986. It is often referred to as the Yale School of deconstruction or even as “American deconstruction” in general. While de Man used the term “deconstruction” and both Derrida and Miller remained aligned with this term throughout their writing, the connection between Bloom and Hartman and deconstruction is less obvious. Three broad factors, however, link these critics and thinkers. First, this grouping of scholars represented a profoundly influential opening in literary theory and criticism in North America at this time, through which French‐influenced poststructuralist theoretical inquiry came to be accepted, albeit contentiously, in the US humanities, although their reading strategies circled much more within the ambit of Derrida than any other French thinker. Second, and more subtly, what the Yale scholars have most in common is a shared interest in European Romanticism, from Derrida's frequent sorties into eighteenth‐century philosophy, de Man's work on Rousseau, to Hartman's many commentaries on English Romantic poetry. As commentators on eighteenth‐century and early nineteenth‐century thought, the Yale School might be thought of as representing the reopening of Enlightenment thought through deconstructive reading. Finally, their influence is perhaps most keenly felt in the impressive array of graduate students who passed through the Yale comparative literature doctoral program at the time and who subsequently came to dominate literary and cultural theory in the United States for a generation. Accordingly, the Yale School might be more meaningfully thought of as identifying this pedagogical legacy with the expanded graduate diaspora being more worthy of the title “Yale School” than the five original scholars. The only significant volume produced by the Yale quintet together is the collection of essays
Deconstruction and Criticism
(Bloom et al. 1979), in which each critic contributes an essay on Shelley's “The triumph of life.”
A
ppadurai,
A
rjun
Authors: Idris Farhad
Published: May 2017

Arjun Appadurai is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies globalization, especially its effect on less developed regions of the world, such as South Asia. His ideas on the role of global media in the imagination of the nation‐state and on ethnic relations and violence are influential in global and cultural studies. Moreover, he is credited with bringing these fields into anthropological inquiry.
Audience Studies
Authors: Murta Anna P.
Published: May 2017

Since the beginning of mass‐produced culture, scholarly research and criticism have had a substantial preoccupation with audience reactions to cultural artifacts. The subject is particularly interesting to cultural studies because it supports one of its basic premises: that complex subjects require an interdisciplinary approach in order to be fully appreciated or understood. Indeed, the duo “cultural practices” plus “audience reaction” has been examined from fields of studies as diverse as mass communication, literary theory, cultural anthropology, philosophy, social psychology, art history, and others.
Auteur Theory
Authors: Ayres Jackson
Published: May 2017

Based on an analogy with literature, auteur theory is a critical model used in film studies and criticism that locates the director as the author of a film, and emphasizes a definition of cinema as a product of the director's personal, singular vision. Auteur theory was developed by French filmmakers and critics in the 1950s, first formally articulated by François Truffaut in his
Cahiers du Cin
é
ma
essay, “Une certaine tendance du cinema français” (1954) and transported to America primarily through the writings of critic Andrew Sarris. Auteur theory requires criticism of an individual film to be placed within the context of its director's oeuvre in order to determine and understand his or her signature style and personal vision, as well as to evaluate the film's and auteur's contribution to “cinema” as a collective. Although auteur theory has been consistently and sometimes harshly criticized since its introduction in the late 1950s, the theory nonetheless remains an influential and prevalent critical model in film studies.
Baker,HoustonA., Jr.
Authors: Towles Matthew D.
Published: May 2017

Houston A. Baker, Jr. is widely recognized as one of the most prolific and important African American scholars of the latter half of the twentieth century. Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1943, Baker is a poet, literary critic, former editor ofAmerican Literature, and the first African American president of the Modern Language Association (1992). He earned a BA at Howard University in 1965, and his master's and doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1966 and 1968, respectively. His honors include Guggenheim, John Hay Whitney, and Rockefeller Fellowships, as well as a number of honorary degrees from American colleges and universities.
Blogging
Authors: Blankenship Laura
Published: May 2017

Blogging is the act of publishing regularly to a web log, also known as a “blog.” Ablog is a dynamic website consisting of individual entries, or posts, presented in reverse chronological order. Blogs are often personal in nature to the extent that many people consider them to be simply online diaries or journals. The term was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, whose
Robot Wisdom
blog was one of the first such sites to follow the structure we now recognize as typical of blogs. Like many others during this early period, his blog was created by manually entering HTML (hypertext markup language) and largely consisted of links to other websites, sometimes with commentary on those links. In the late 1990s and the early part of the new century, simple tools were developed that allowed even those without the ability to write HTML code to maintain and write blogs, leading to the rise in popularity of blogging. “Xanga,” “Blogger,” and “Live Journal” were all early tools that allowed easy posting to a website. In addition to the creation of these tools, social and cultural developments led to an increase in the popularity of blogs, and their numbers rose steadily between 2001 and 2004, from around 150,000 to more than 4 million. Blogs have continued to grow in popularity and, as of early 2008, there were more than 100 million of them worldwide, covering topics as wide‐ranging as knitting and the environment. Group blogs have sprung up around topics or political preferences; businesses have blogs to market their products and candidates for political office have blogs; newspapers have blogs or have added the ability for readers to comment on columns, a feature that originated from blogs, moving even this one‐way communication medium toward something that is more participatory and democratic.
B
ourdieu,
P
ierre
Authors: Bain J. Grant
Published: May 2017

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was an influential French theorist whose work has had a major impact on ethnography, sociology, and philosophy. Born in Denguin, in the Pyrenees‐Atlantiques region of France, Bourdieu studied philosophy at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris, finishing agregation in 1955. He taught at the Lycee Banville in Moulins in 1954, but was called to carry out military service in Algeria from 1958 to 1960, during which time he fostered his interest in ethnographic research. After returning to France, he held a series of administrative posts at various institutions, including as director of studies at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in 1964, and the chair of sociology at the College de France (1981–2). He and Luc Boltanski founded the influential interdisciplinary journal
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales
in 1975. Over his career, Bourdieu received many awards for his scholarship, including the “Medaille d'or du centre national de la recherche scientifique” (1993), the University of California, Berkeley's Goffman Prize (1996), and the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2002).
Celebrity
Authors: Redmond Sean
Published: May 2017

The term “celebrity” is used to define a person whose name, image, lifestyle, and opinions carry cultural and economic worth, and who are first and foremost idealized popular media constructions. According to Rein et al., “a celebrity is a name which once made by the news, now makes news by itself (1997:14). Celebrities exist in the eye of the media, are often adored by their fans, and are valuable commodities in terms of their use and exchange value. Chris Rojek argues that celebrification and commodity capitalism are closely aligned: “Capitalism requires consumers to develop abstract desire for commodities…. Celebrity culture is therefore partly the expression of a cultural axis organized around abstract desire. It is an essential tool of commodification since it embodies desire. In particular, it provides consumers with compelling standards of emulation” (2001: 187).
Class
Authors: Milner Andrew
Published: May 2017

Social class denotes a particular human group, located within a hierarchical order of unequal such groups, the identity and membership of which are determined primarily by economic considerations such as occupation, income, and wealth. This usage dates from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Unlike older terms for social inequality, such as “rank,” “class” denotes different degrees of success in the marketplace, rather than a supposedly natural hierarchy. It is thus a characteristically modern term to describe a characteristically modern phenomenon.
Cultural Anthropology
Authors: Martin Keir
Published: May 2017

Cultural anthropology is the study of the diversity of human thought and activity, placing particular emphasis on describing and theorizing the variety of sociocultural contexts within which people make sense of their worlds, as being central to understanding what it is to be human. Cultural anthropology as a recognized subdiscipline emerged in the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, under the guidance of Franz Boas, who is widely regarded as the founder of modern American anthropology. Boas's work as a collector and curator for ethnological museum displays led him to challenge prevailing views of cultural evolution and the idea that similar cultural traits or artifacts found in different contexts necessarily demonstrated similarities of use or meaning. Instead, he argued for the importance of understanding such phenomena within their particular cultural context. For Boas and most American cultural anthropologists who followed him, such as his student Ruth Benedict or the prominent anthropologist Margaret Mead, this was more than just a theoretically important argument. The understanding of different patterns of behavior as being meaningful within their own specific cultural context was a weapon to be used in an ongoing political struggle against intolerance or assumptions of Western cultural superiority. For Benedict (1946), cultures were merely different and the job of the anthropologist was to attempt to render them meaningful in their own terms as far possible. Culture became the factor that explained difference between people while making it possible to maintain a belief in humanity's fundamental biological unity. This was a radical argument to make at a time when assumptions of racial hierarchy, and in particular white superiority, were widely accepted in North America and Europe, and movements such as eugenics or Nazism could command respectable support. Instead of the seemingly irrational behaviors or beliefs of non‐Western people being explicable in terms of their innate inferiority, they were understandable and rational within the terms of the culture which gave them meaning.
Cultural Studies
Authors: Turner Graeme
Published: May 2017

Cultural studies has been among the most influential, and certainly one of the more controversial, of the new, interdisciplinary, theoretical fields to emerge out of the humanities and social sciences from the 1970s onwards. It has had an effect on the theoretical orientation and research methodologies of a wide range of associated and cognate disciplines. In this volume alone, the significance of the cultural studies influence is noted in relation to film studies, television studies, media studies, literary studies, and communications studies. Many of the core theoretical movements to have arisen within the humanities since the 1970s‐structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism, for example – have been most vigorously prosecuted through cultural studies projects, while its focus on particular categories of analysis (audiences, for instance) has permeated many other fields. The interdisciplinary reach of cultural studies has often been appropriative, and the field has derived its eclectic mix of methodologies and theoretical insights from history, anthropology, cultural geography, film theory, sociology, continental philosophy, and literary theory, to name just a few.
Culture Industry
Authors: Bettig Ronald V.
Published: May 2017

The term “culture industry” refers to the entire corporate‐dominated institutional apparatus through which various forms of culture are produced and distributed within modern capitalist economies. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer first introduced the concept of a culture industry in an essay originally published in 1944 as an in‐house publication for what came to be known as the Frankfurt School. The essay was not published in English until 1972, since when there has been a new translation (Horkheimer ∓Adorno 2002[1944]), although other works of the school did become readily available earlier than this (such as Herbert Marcuse's
One Dimensional Man)
. The essay was exceptional in that it provided a strong critique, receptive to a New Left audience, of industrialized culture organizations set up to produce standardized and homogenized cultural commodities for their exchange value, or profit, based on false rather than genuine human needs. Hence, music, movies, radio broadcasting, pulp fiction, and advertising created mass deception. In anticipation of television, Horkheimer ∓Adorno foresaw the total commodification and massification of the culture industry.
D
u
B
ois,
W. E. B.
Authors: Tucker Terrence
Published: May 2017

William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois (1868–1963) was one of the preeminent figures in American and African American letters of the twentieth century. In the first half of the century he established himself as a powerful and relentless voice in calling for African American voting rights, cooperation and equality between whites and blacks, and an end to Jim Crow segregation. His birth in Massachusetts and his death in Ghana bookend a key period in African American life, specifically the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1895, Du Bois became the first African American to be awarded a PhD from Harvard University. Although the degree was in history, Du Bois established himself as a figure who frequently engaged in interdisciplinary work, establishing the sociology department at the historically black Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) after teaching at Wilberforce University in Ohio and the University of Pennsylvania. His writings ranged from the sociological text
The Philadelphia Negro
(1899) to his first novel,
The Quest of the Silver Fleece
(1911).
F
airclough,
N
orman
Authors: Jolliffe David A.
Published: May 2017

Norman Fairclough (b. 1941), widely acknowledged as one of the founders and major proponents of the field of critical discourse analysis (CDA), is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, where he is also an associate of the Institute for Advanced Studies. Fair‐clough has been developing the theory and practice of CDA since the 1980s, examining the roles that language plays in social relations of power and ideology and interrogating how language influences processes of social change. His approach is interdisciplinary, owing a strong allegiance to Michael Halliday's (1978) systemic‐functional linguistics, to Bob Hodge ∓Gunter Kress's (1988) practices of critical linguistics, and to European social theory: Michel Foucault's (1971) concept of “the orders of discourse,” Louis Althusser's (1971) notion of ideological state apparatuses, and Michel Pecheux's (1982) idea of language as a material form of ideology. Fairclough's work operates in a middle ground between linguistics and social theory. His analyses make claims about how discourses (stretches of language longer than the sentence) are both shaped by and themselves shape social, economic, and political power relationships; moreover, his analyses are grounded in material evidence drawn from actual texts and talk, using principles from systemic‐functional and critical linguistics. The development of Fairclough's CDA program in the 1980s and 1990s led to his recognition as one of the human sciences' most trenchant analysts of how Margaret Thatcher's government deployed key terms – for example “globalization,” “new capitalism,” and “the knowledge economy” – to powerful ends.
Fashion Studies
Authors: Kawamura Yuniya
Published: May 2017

Fashion studies is an area of inquiry that treats fashion as a symbolic cultural object and as an aspect of the larger culture as a whole. It is a new area of research that draws upon many academic disciplines, including cultural studies, sociology, psychology, literature, history, and art history. A great deal of fashion writing in the mass media often alienates scholars and professionals from the topic because they doubt the legitimacy of the subject, which is‐believed to be trivial, ephemeral, and without any intellectual rationale or substance. However, fashion studies deserves a more serious academic consideration, especially in cultural studies and the sociology of culture and the arts.
Film Genre
Authors: Redmond Sean
Published: May 2017

In film studies genre is used to analyze and classify films according to their shared audiovisual and narrative conventions, ideological structures, identification processes, and industrial or commercial properties. A film genre is understood to be an intertextual, commodity‐centered construct, its existence dependent on its imagined relationship with other films of the same type and with interested audiences, as well as on its ability to be produced, marketed, and promoted on the basis of its aesthetic and pleasure‐making unity. A horror film, for example, arranges its discordant nondiegetic music; unsettling play with light and shadow, and night and day; closed and labyrinth‐like spaces; and destruction of the (female) human body and/or mind, in ways with which viewers are familiar because they have been repeated in films across time. The horror film is also produced, packaged, and marketed in DVD releases, posters, and trailers through recurring images and sounds that invite viewers to recognize (and be tempted by) the association. These include shots of attics, basements, woods, knives, masks, eyes, cat‐and‐mouse chase sequences, and accompanying sounds of screams, moans, and sharp piano chords.
Film Theory
Authors: Hoyle Brian , Murray Chris
Published: May 2017

Film theory includes any and all theoretical discourse concerned with debating and defining the nature of cinema, including attempts to identify it as a distinct art form, to address its artistic and social functions, to discuss its relationship to reality, and to assess its engagement of the spectator.
F
row,
J
ohn
Authors: Shepard Iris
Published: May 2017

John Frow (b. 1948), a highly acclaimed critic of media, communication, and popular culture, is the current chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He was educated at Wagga High School and the Australian National University. From 1971 to 1975 Frow conducted his graduate studies in the comparative literature program at Cornell University, including a year at the University of Heidelberg. He has worked at numerous universities: from 1975 to 1989 he was at Murdoch University in Western Australia; from 1990 to 1999 he served as a chair at the University of Queensland; from 2000 to 2004 he was the Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has also held visiting research and teaching positions at the University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago. Currently, as well as being the chair of English Languages and Literature at the University of Melbourne, Frow is the head of the School of Culture and Communication. His current research includes investigations of cultural memory and the city of Port Arthur and of the notion of cultural property as it impacts the character and forms of personhood. In addition to numerous articles, book chapters, and book reviews, Frow has authored six books:
Marxism and Literary History
(1986),
Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader
(1993),
Cultural Studies and Cultural Value
(1995),
Time and Commodity Culture
(1997),
Accounting for Taste: Australian Everyday Cultures
(with Tony Bennett and Michel Emmison; 1999), and
Genre
(2005). His forthcoming publications include the
Handbook of Cultural Research
, coedited with Bennett.