bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Actant/Actantial Grammar
Authors: Perron Paul
Published: May 2017

The term “actant” emerged in the conjunction of semiotics (the study of signs), and narrative semantics (the study of narrative in terms of its deep structures). It is chiefly used to describe narrative functions akin to Vladimir Propp's “sphere of action,” the narrative “role” performed by an “actor,” which adheres to deep structural tendencies and patterns. The concepts actant and “actantial grammar” are both associated with Algirdas Julien Greimas, who borrowed the term from the French linguist Lucien Tesniere, who defined actants as “beings or things that participate in processes in any form and in any way whatsoever, be it only a walk‐on part and in the most passive way” (1969: 102; translation mine). Tesniere considered that the verbal nucleus of a sentence represented a sort of minor drama in the theatrical sense, or a process expressed by a verb whose dependants are substantives (actants are here considered as elements that perform or are subjected to an act) and adverbs (circumstances of time, place, goal, and cause in which the action occurs; “circumstants”). The actant designates a syntactic unit that is formal in character but has a distinct relationship to the predicate and the circumstants. For Tesniere only three actants were possible: the subject, the object of an active verb or the agent of a passive one, and the receiver. However, the number of circumstants can vary a good deal.
Archetype
Authors: Chirila Alexander
Published: May 2017

Archetypes, understood as universal symbols of psychic reality, were first described systematically by the Swiss psychoanalyst, C. G. Jung. In their simplest and most familiar forms, archetypes are character images (e.g., the Hero or Father), but they can take a variety of more abstract forms (e.g., Anima and Animus). They are commonly found in myths, parables, fairytales, and a wide range of literary texts of primordial human experience. They are landmarks on the path of human evolution, and their interactions express the dynamics of a changing mind. According to Jung, archetypes can be found in the unconscious and conscious minds, where they take on stylized and ritualized forms, far removed from the realm of actual experience. In their primary form, they are signs composed of two distinct and intertwined elements. The first is a stable, universal and primordial core of meaning, and the second is a surrounding flux of signification and association that adapts to social, cultural, and ideological contexts. Although universally familiar, archetypes are promethean; although transcendent by definition, they are rarely seen out of context. Post‐Jungian George H. Jensen has written that “Archetypes, which Jung says evolve over time, are constantly being transformed and reinterpreted by the individual's consciousness, and they are inseparable from language, history, and culture” (2009: 4).
B
ooth,
W
ayne
Authors: Dahlgren Paul
Published: May 2017

Wayne Booth (1921–2005) had a profound impact on both literary criticism and on the re‐emergence of rhetorical studies in the twentieth century. He worked on subjects as diverse as narrative technique, theories of irony, and the nature of assent in argument. While Booth began his career as a specialist in eighteenth‐century British literature, trained by the neo‐Aristotelian critic R. S. Crane, his work regularly transcended historical and methodological categorization. At the time of his death he was the George M. Pullman Professor Emeritus of Distinguished Service for the Department of English Language and Literature for the University of Chicago.
Discourse
Authors: Munif Yasser
Published: May 2017

The term “discourse” refers to a systematic and relational sequence of meaningful statements (speech and text) and semiotic elements (signs and symbols) that influence practices and give expression to the values, behaviors, and worldviews of social groups. Historically, the concept was in use in the sixteenth century to describe the practice of speaking or writing at length about a particular theme. In everyday language, the term is often used casually to imply a structured argument about a particular theme. The modern genealogy of the concept, however, goes back to the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and includes pre‐eminent poststructuralist theorists like Michel Foucault. For mainstream linguistics, highly indebted to Saussure, the focus is on the analysis of the internal mechanisms of language in use. In contrast, according to the Foucauldian perspective, which tends to be more influential in cultural studies and literary theory, the emphasis is on examining the impact of discourse on the social sphere.
E
mpson,
W
illiam
Authors: Fothergill Anthony
Published: May 2017

William Empson (1906–84) was a literary scholar and poet whose major works made him one of the most influential critics in England and the US from the 1930s onwards. Although committed to the idea of “close reading” commonly associated with the American new criticism, Empson's critical position consistently, often conten‐tiously, insisted on the importance of linguistic and historical context, of language as understood and used by ordinary people, and the importance of biography and authorial intention as key to the understanding of literary works. His abiding contribution remains his stress on close textual criticism but within this broader context, particularly on the analysis of the ambiguity and complexity of literary language and the creativity of oppositional, subversive readings of “canonical” texts.
Fabula/Sjuzhet
Authors: Petrov Petre
Published: May 2017

The conceptually related terms
fabula
and
sjuzhet
, rendered into English approximately as “story” and “plot,” were elaborated by the Russian formalists within their overall theory of narrative prose. In formalist usage, the two terms acquire a significance markedly different from that of their English equivalents, as well as from their traditional meaning in Russian. Thus
sjuzhet
is best understood as plot construction (or emplotment), viewed formally, while
fabula
should be grasped as the sequence of events making up a story (or storyline), but viewed outside the artistic process of narration. The distinction between the two allowed the formalist theoreticians to make significant headway in grasping the workings of form in literary fiction. More specifically, it provided them with the conceptual means for bringing the essential topics of “deformation,” “perceptibility,” and “defamiliarization” outside the initial sphere of poetic language and extending their applicability to the narrative genres of literature. The differentiation between storyline and the manner of its emplotment has had foundational importance for the discipline of narratology. Influential Western theories have relied on analogous dichotomies to analyze the structure of fictional texts:
histoire
vs.
recit
(Gerard Genette), “story” vs. “discourse” (Seymour Chatman), “fabula” vs. “story” (Mieke Bal) and so on. The isolation of these two aspects has enabled, on the one hand, the exploration of the narrative structures that underlie the endlessly varied stories we tell; on the other hand, it has furthered inquiry into the different modalities of narrative presentation (order, point view, voice, mood, and so on).
Functions (Narrative)
Authors: Seckler Dawn
Published: May 2017

The term “function” refers to the most basic unit of a narrative. The Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp is often credited with first using the term in his seminal work
Morphology of the Folktale
(1968[1928]). The term was later appropriated by French structuralists like Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Claude Lévi‐Strauss, and Tzvetan Todorov, who sought to identify common narrative structures in literary discourse. Although the definition of the term differs slightly in the work of these theorists, in every instance it maintains the meaning of a narrative unit.
G
enette,
G
érard
Authors: McIver Mia L.
Published: May 2017

Gérard Genette (b. 1930), one of the most influential theorists of narratology, has been working since the 1960s to develop and refine an analytic vocabulary with which to understand how fictional narratives are constructed and communicated. A pioneer in the field of narratology, he has gone on to make significant contributions to poetics and aesthetics and has written on a wide variety of topics ranging from music to the visual and plastic arts.
Genre Theory
Authors: Türkkan Sevinc
Published: May 2017

Genre is the term used to characterize groups of similar texts that share certain recognizable conventions and that belong in the same literary tradition. Since Aristotle, genre has functioned fairly consistently in Western literary discourse and has shaped critical theory and creative practice. At the same time, its meaning, validity, and purpose have been repeatedly questioned and redefined. The Aristotelian division of genres – epic, lyric, and drama – which was the hallmark of Renaissance and neoclassical poetics, was first called into question during the European Romantic movement centered in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the works of Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Novalis, the concept of genre came under serious scrutiny and gave rise to debates we see in contemporary genre theory. Before the era of the German Romantics, genres were thought to be stable, universal categories, immune to historical change; it was also generally agreed that the existence of new genres was inadmissible on the grounds that Aristotle had not accounted for them. With the Romantics came an understanding of genres as historically determined and dynamic entities. In the later nineteenth century, evolutionary models of development emerged, according to which it was possible to trace the specific nature of such historical determination. By the end of the twentieth century, Genette could argue, in
The Architext
(1992[1979]), that the tripartite division of genre has been wrongly attributed to Aristotle alone and that it is more accurate to speak of a conflation of Plato and Aristotle's understanding of genre. Despite two centuries of controversy and the rise of new, hybrid forms, the classical division of literature into epic, lyric, and dramatic genres remains foundational to our thinking about literary typology.
G
entile,
G
iovanni
Authors: Ryan Kathleen
Published: May 2017

Giovanni Gentile (1875 – 1944) was an influential Italian philosopher, educator, and politician chiefly remembered for his educational reforms and adherence to fascism. Born in Castelvetrano (Trapani), Sicily, Gentile studied philosophy at the University of Pisa (1893 – 7) and went on to teach at
licei
(secondary schools) in Campobasso and Naples before earning a docent position in the philosophy department at the University of Naples in 1903. From 1907 to 1932, he held successive faculty positions at the universities of Palermo, Pisa, and Rome. Gentile took a leave of absence from Rome to serve as Minister of Public Instruction under Mussolini from 1922 to 1924. The fascist regime named him director of the University of Pisa in 1932 and president of the Academy of Italy in 1943, a term cut short by his assassination in 1944.
G
ramsci,
A
ntonio
Authors: Markowicz Daniel M.
Published: May 2017

Antonio Gramsci was a leading Marxist intellectual whose theories of ideology and hegemony have had a profound impact on contemporary thinking about literature and culture. He founded or edited some of the most notable political newspapers in Italy in the first quarter of the twentieth century, including
L'Ordine Nuovo
(The New Order) and
Grido del Popolo
(Shout of the People). He was a factory organizer, representative to the Communist International in Moscow (1922 – 4), Member of Parliament, and Secretary General of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Imprisoned for organizing an insurrection against Mussolini's Italian Fascist regime, Gramsci wrote important texts on Italian history and politics, culture, and Marxist theory, the
Prison Notebooks
, for which he is best known and in which he reflected on the nature of dominant social groups, particularly how such groups manage to maintain ideological hegemony in the society at large. Thirty‐three notebooks containing his writings were smuggled from his room in a Roman clinic, where he was treated for spinal malformations (due to Pott's disease, a form of tuberculosis) that plagued him his whole life. He died there on April 27, 1937. From the time of his trial, he was considered a dangerous thinker, so much so that the public prosecutor pointed to him and declared, “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning” (Fiori 1971: 230).
Lacan,Jacques
Authors: Brivic Shelly , Moore Gerald , Rabaté Jean‐Michel
Published: May 2017

Jacques Lacan (1901 – 81), arguably the most influential psychoanalyst after Sigmund Freud, pursued throughout his career a rewriting of Freudian ideas that brought to bear on them the insights of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics as well as the insights gleaned from his own highly unconventional clinical practice. He is known for his structuralist theory of psychoanalysis, whereby the self or ego is considered to be far less important than the unconscious. Lacan polemicized against the dominant school of Anglo‐American psychoanalysis at the time, which was known as “ego psychology.” He saw the unconscious as being a much more important part of the mind. His great innovation was to compare the operations of the mind to those of language. One of his most famous contentions was that “the unconscious is structured like/as a language.” Lacan's work was especially influential after the publication of his major work,Ecrits, in 1966 and is seen by many as being a contributing force to the advent of poststructuralism. He diverted Freudian thinking away from its problematic biological foundation and shifted its emphasis toward the idea of consciousness defined as a play of delusion and revelatory signification. He emphasized the conflict between the conscious ego (the realm of signifiers such as symptoms or desired objects) and the unconscious (the realm of signifieds such as repressed motives that are unavailable to consciousness). The self is therefore much more complex than the ego, which for Lacan is prone to self‐serving delusions and is structurally incapable of seeing the unconscious that is the real locus of psychic meaning. The self therefore should be conceived of in the linguistic sense as a “subject,” one part of a system of utterances and of rules for generating them that extends far beyond the reach of the ego.
Neo‐Humanism
Authors: Caufield James Walter
Published: May 2017

Variously known as neo‐humanism, new humanism, and American humanism, this conservative movement in American literary and cultural criticism came to prominence in the first decade of the twentieth century and largely faded from view by the late 1930s. Neo‐humanism was fiercely antimodernist and attacked what it saw as symptoms of materialism, socialism, and relativism in American culture. Neo‐humanism opposed itself to virtually every intellectual and artistic development that had occurred in the wake of the European enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although its animus was directed particularly against the emancipatory political energies associated with the French Revolution and against nineteenth‐century romanticism more broadly, symbolized in the person of the French philosopher Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. The neo‐humanists also deplored much of the progress made in the natural sciences from the time of Francis Bacon to that of Albert Einstein, in philosophyfrom RenEe Descartes and Baruch Spinoza to Henri Bergson and William James, and in literature from Michel de Montaigne and William Shakespeare to Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser. The Anglo‐American poet and critic T. S. Eliot was neo‐humanism's chief exponent outside the United States and, although he showed at best a qualified enthusiasm for the movement, Eliot's conservative cultural and critical attitudes were nevertheless closely akin to those of key neo‐humanists. When Eliot famously described himself as “a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo‐Catholic in religion” (1929: vii), he gave perhaps the most concise expression to the central tenets of neo‐humanism.
W
innicott,
D. W.
Authors: Chatterjee Ranita
Published: May 2017

Donald Woods Winnicott (1896 – 1971), a British pediatrician, child psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, introduced into psychotherapy key innovations concerning early child development, particularly concepts like “transitional objects” and “good‐enough mothering.” He argued that the early interactions with the mother or primary care giver are crucial for a child's healthy growth and development. In his 40 years working as psychoanalyst and pediatrician at Paddington Green Children's Hospital in London, Winnicott saw several thousand infants, children, parents, and grandparents. Influenced by Melanie Klein and Sigmund and Anna Freud, Winnicott focused on the role of what he called the “facilitating environment” in the healthy formation of identity. The infant's relationship with the mother dominates this early environment. Winnicott's famous remark that “there is no such thing as a baby” (1958: 99) stems from his observation that in the early stages of human development, before an autonomous identity is created, the infant exists solely through its various relationships with his or her mother. Winnicott not only trained in psychoanalysis with Klein, but also helped articulate a middle position during the protracted “Controversial Discussions” (1943 – 4) between Anna Freud and Klein. Although Winnicott did not develop a theoretical system – many of his ideas, collected and published in 1958, were first presented as lectures at professional meetings and as informal talks on the radio – his work on mothers and the environment that they do or do not create for their children are associated with the object‐relations school of psychoanalysis.
A
ppiah,
K
wame
A
nthony
Authors: Valassopoulos Anastasia
Published: May 2017

Kwame Anthony Appiah's work is popular and influential across many genres including philosophy, African American studies, and more recently, postcolonial studies. He was born in London in 1954 and lived in Ghana and England. He was educated at Cambridge, where he studied semantics and philosophy. Currently he is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. Appiah is also a crime fiction writer and has written three novels, among which are
Another Death in Venice
and
Nobody Likes Letitia
.
Bakhtinian Criticism
Authors: Hirschkop Ken
Published: May 2017

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a twentieth‐century Russian philosopher turned literary critic and theorist. After the devastation of World War I and the drama of the Russian Revolution – he was 22 at the time of the latter – Bakhtin embarked on a search for a new basis for moral and ethical life. At first he believed that the key to making ethical life more compelling and central was philosophy. Only through a new ethical philosophy could one demonstrate that sympathy and ethical action revolved around an ineradicable distance between ourselves and others, a distance that, once acknowledged, would lead us to appreciate our need for others and their need for us. But although Bakhtin would continue to write philosophically throughout his life, from the mid‐1920s onward he began to rework this argument as a theory of language and literature, in which “novelistic discourse,” rather than philosophy, became the means by which Europe would regain its moral and political bearings. In the course of writing three books, drafts for several essays, and many, many notebooks – only a few of his works were finished during his lifetime – Bakhtin argued for the power of three elements of this novelistic discourse: its dialogical language, its carnivalesque imagery, and its chronotopic narrative. Each of these, in its own way, contributed to a deep‐seated transformation in our sense of the world and our relations, ethical and political, with others.
B
al,
M
ieke
Authors: Hughes Joe
Published: May 2017

Mieke Bal (b. 1946) is a European scholar of literature and culture who specializes in narrative theory. Her writing is thoroughly interdisciplinary and ranges from literature to visual culture to theology and biblical studies. She has been particularly influential in defining the fields of narratology and cultural analysis. Her early work in narratology informed much of her later work in visual culture, cultural analysis, and what she “somewhat halfheartedly” called “postmodern theology” (2006: xix). It was largely through the conceptual structures developed in
Narratology
(1985[1980]) that Bal began to study non‐literary objects.
B
loom,
H
arold
Authors: Feehily Claire
Published: May 2017

Harold Bloom (b. 1930) is an American academic and one of the most prominent postwar literary critics. Since 1959, in many books, articles, and reviews, he has written about an extensive range of individual writers and genres; more recently his concerns have included religious themes, mysticism, the Bible, and Jewish culture. Bloom's works on Romanticism, poetic influence, and Aestheticism were of significant academic influence. But his international success is also derived from bestselling work for a wider readership. In particular, Bloom is associated with a spirited and polemical defense of Western canonical literature against the “School of Resentment,” his term for the theoretical criticism within English Studies in higher education. Bloom was born in New York City in 1930, the son of working‐class Yiddish‐speaking parents. After winning a scholarship from the State Department of Education, he graduated from Cornell University in 1951. He gained his PhD from Yale University in 1955 and has continued to work at Yale, holding the title of Sterling Professor of Humanities since 1983. Between 1988 and 2004 Bloom was also Berg Professor of English at New York University. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy, and a past Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University.
Body, The
Authors: Moore Gerald
Published: May 2017

As evidenced in the twisted, inhuman bodies of Francis Bacon, the preserved and plastinated bodies of Damian Hirst and Günther von Hagens, and the prosthetically enhanced performance art of Stelarc, the embodiedness and materiality of identity is one of the principal fascinations of twentieth‐century and contemporary artistic discourse. In philosophy and theory, too, emphases on lived experience, mortality, and desire represent a substantial break from the Christian legacy of European modernity.
Canons
Authors: Mukherjee Ankhi
Published: May 2017

Secular and literary applications of the term “canon” refer to a constellation of highly valued, high‐cultural texts that have traditionally acted as arbiters of literary value, determining the discipline of literary studies as well as influencing the critical and cultural reception of literature. In his influential work on the subject,
The Western Canon
(1994), Yale critic Harold Bloom offers several approximate definitions of canonicity. The canon is “the literary Art of Memory,” if by memory we mean “an affair of imaginary places, or of real places transmuted into visual images” (17). The canon serves as a memory system, which receives, retains, and orders selective works. It is “the relation of an individual reader and writer to what has been preserved out of what has been written” (17). The canon, Bloom argues, is a standard of measurement that cannot be tethered to political or moral considerations: it should remain instead “a gauge of vitality” (38). Finally Bloom declares that the canon is “Shakespeare and Dante,” before proceeding to offer creative readings of 26 of the most prominent canonical authors, and an egregious list of 400 canonical authors or works.
Habermas,Jürgen
Authors: Wild Min
Published: May 2017

Jürgen Habermas is a central figure in the philosophy of communication and of the legacy of the Enlightenment; he is the major living proponent of critical theory as originally practiced by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Germany's most eminent and controversial living philosopher, his prolific, neo‐Marxist works have consistently argued for the possibility of social change through rational discussion and intersubjective engagement, where humans as active agents can find common ground. His work stands as a substantial and persuasive alternative to poststructuralism because it grounds humans as effective subjects, having the ability to reach logical agreements. His view of the Enlightenment is largely positive, in that it represented a period of unprecedented social criticism and potentially fruitful change.
Intertextuality
Authors: Orr Mary
Published: May 2017

“Intertextuality” names a text's relations to other texts in the larger “mosaic” of cultural practices and their expression. An “intertext” is therefore a focalizing point within this network or system, while a text's “intertextual” potential and status are derived from its relations with other texts past, present, and future. Unlike the term “reference,” to which it is closely allied, “intertextuality” has no verb form and hence has unlimited powers of designation, but not specification to a particular kind of textual activity (Orr 2003). However, unlike critical terms such as “allusion,” “intertextuality” has a specific provenance and date. In her work on the Russian critic and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva described and named the concept of “intertextualité” in a series of essays between 1966 and 1968 published in French in 1969 (asSemeiotiké: recherches pour une sémanalyse). WhileSemeiotikèhas been translated into English only in part (by L. Roudiez in 1980 and others in Moi 1986), Kristeva's term needed no translation into cognate European tongues sharing Greek and Latin heritages. Its instant and spontaneous success lay in its applicability, to multifarious cultural forms and practices, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to the cultural sea change post‐1968 in notions about language and power, namely that these were decentered and in process rather than being given or fixed. Kristeva's complex and careful redefinitions of Bakhtin's work on “dialogism,” “carnival,” and “polyphony” as “intertextuality” were thus rapidly re‐spun in a plethora of theoretical and applied work on language, cultural practices, and power structures now understood as “the linguistic turn.” Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Philippe Sollers, and Michel Foucault all variously inflected and reshaped Kristeva's “intertextuality” by focusing on its core idea, the notion that there is nothing outside of language, and hence of the text.
I
rigaray,
L
uce
Authors: Munford Rebecca
Published: May 2017

Luce Irigaray (b. 1932) is a Belgian‐born feminist philosopher and practicing psychoanalyst whose work ranges over the disciplines of philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, social theory, and law. Irigaray has famously eschewed questions about her personal life in order to prevent biographical references from “disrupting” people when they read her work (Amsberg & Steenhuis 1983). This means that biographical information about Irigaray is both limited and difficult to verify. Common accounts convey that she was educated at the University of Louvain and, after teaching for several years in Brussels, moved to France and attended the University of Paris, where she received a Master's in psychology and a diploma in psychopathology. In the 1960s she taught at the University of Vincennes and was a member of L'École Freudienne de Paris, where she trained with the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. From 1964 she worked at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where she later became Director of Research in Philosophy. More recently, Irigaray has been a visiting professor in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Nottingham and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool.
Iser,Wolfgang
Authors: Riquelme John Paul
Published: May 2017

Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007), German literary theorist and critic, became influential in the English‐speaking world in the 1970s when reader‐response criticism emerged as an alternative to New Criticism. He later wrote extensively about creativity and about literature from a philosophical anthropological perspective. As William St Clair (2007) has noted, aspects of Iser's views about the reading process have become so thoroughly absorbed into literary critical thinking attentive to the audience that their origin is often forgotten. In 1981, Stanley Fish pointed out that Iser'sThe Implied ReaderandThe Act of Reading, both available in paperback, were widely studied in graduate courses on literary theory in the 1980s and were the bestselling titles in literary theory from Johns Hopkins University Press, an influential publisher in that field.
K
ermode,
F
rank
Authors: Eaglestone Robert
Published: May 2017

Frank Kermode was an English literary critic. Born in 1919 on the Isle of Man, he taught at Reading, Newcastle, Manchester, Bristol, University College London and Cambridge, where he was King Edward VII Professor of English. Knighted in 1991, he died in 2010.
L
atino/a Theory
Authors: Aldama Frederick
Published: May 2017

Latino/a theory covers a massive range of disciplinary pursuits and explorations. Given that we are and have been active shapers of all facets of our North American reality, such scholarly impulses seek to make visible the culture, history, and presence of Latino/as in the US. This essay will map the territory that makes up contemporary or “postclassical” theories of Latino/a cultural production that build on and extend classical Latino/a studies theory.
de M
an,
P
aul
Authors: McQuillan Martin
Published: May 2017

Paul de Man (1919–83) was a Belgian literary critic and theorist most commonly identified with the Yale School of deconstruction and the posthumous revelation of his wartime journalism in occupied Belgium. However, de Man's life and work is considerably more diverse and complex than these associations would suggest.
McC
lintock,
A
nne
Authors: Gething Anna L. H.
Published: May 2017

Anne McClintock (b. 1954) has published widely on imperialism, nationalism, and postcolonialism; race, gender, and sexuality; cultural theory, including feminist, psychoanalytic, and queer theory; and popular and visual culture. Her work is interdisciplinary and transnational, covering the literatures and cultures of Victorian and contemporary Britain, South Africa, Ireland, twentieth‐century and contemporary United States, as well as world literature. McClintock has been the recipient of numerous awards, including two prestigious MacArthur‐ SSRC fellowships and many creative writing fellowships. She lectures worldwide; her work has been widely anthologized, and translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Swedish. McClintock is currently Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, moving as a child to South Africa where she was later involved in the anti‐apartheid movement. She began her university studies at the University of Cape Town, completing a BA in English in 1977, before traveling to the UK to study for an MPhil in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. In 1989 she gained a PhD in English Literature from Columbia University, where she became an associate professor of gender and cultural studies, teaching in the Department of English and the Institute of African Studies. She then held a visiting professorship at New York University.
Performativity
Authors: Belas Oliver
Published: May 2017

A widely used term in postmodern and “deconstructive” literary and cultural theory, “performativity” is a particularly important concept in the work of Jean‐François Lyotard (1984[1979]), Judith Butler (1990[1988]; 1999[1990]), and Homi Bhabha (1994), whose theories of, respectively, gender, postcolonialism, and the postmodern have been highly influential, though not uncontested (see Connor 1997:2343; Nussbaum 1999; Hallward 2001). The “performative utterance” of speech act theory is another significant permutation of performativity, and while the likes of Butler and Bhabha are most obviously influenced by so‐called “continental philosophy,” they are certainly aware of the earlier interventions of J. L. Austin (1971; 1971[1963]), John Searle (1971 [1965]), and others (see Strawson 1971 [1964]). Indeed, the idea that language is active and constitutive (that is, it makes rather than “passively” describes), that through language things are
enacted
, is common to both “deconstructive” and speech act performativities.
R
ancière,
J
acques
Authors: Murray Alex
Published: May 2017

Since the late 1990s, Jacques Rancière (b. 1940) has risen to prominence in the Anglophone world for his exploration of art and politics. Rancière's career began as coauthor of the volume
Lire le Capital
(later translated as
Reading “Capital”)
with Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar (1968). He soon parted ways with Althusser, whose “scientific” or structural model of Marxism he found limiting. The notion of a social science that circulates in the Marxist tradition takes as its premise certain assumptions about what is “good” or “beneficial” for the subjugated working classes. It also attempts to explain the failures of class revolt by creating totalizing structural theories. Yet these theoretical positions often remain aloof from the ground of history, eschewing the “experience” of those it speaks for by claiming it remains tainted by its exposure to hegemonic forms of ideology. It was in teaching in the largely Althussserian philosophy department and University of Paris VIII that Rancière realized the dogmatic nature of “scholarly” teaching.
Reader‐Response Studies
Authors: Hughes Joe
Published: May 2017

At its most general, reader‐response studies begins with the assertion that the study of literature cannot afford to overlook the role of the reader. From this point of view, it has a long history. Plato's concerns regarding poetry in the
Republic
, Aristotle's
Poetics
, rhetoric's cultivation of the arts of pleasure, persuasion, and education, the eighteenth‐century discourse on beauty and the sublime: all fall within this category. If contemporary reader‐response studies distinguishes itself from this tradition, it is because it explicitly problematizes the two poles involved in the act of reading: the text and the reader. It does so from the vantage point of new, critical philosophies of the subject (primarily phenomenology, but also psychology and psychoanalysis) and of language (structuralism and linguistics). Modern reader‐response theory could thus be said to begin with Husserlian phenomenology, persist through the “linguistic turn,” and finally become dispersed in poststructuralist, Marxist, and new historicist theories.
S
mith,
B
arbara
H.
Authors: Hughes Joe
Published: May 2017

Barbara Herrnstein Smith has written widely and influentially on almost every major problem of humanistic inquiry. Her earlier work was preoccupied with literary theory and poetics. More recently she has written on cognitive science, the relations between the humanities and the sciences, and the philosophy of biology.
S
pivak,
G
ayatri
C
hakravorty
Authors: Morton Stephen
Published: May 2017

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the most influential literary and cultural theorists of the late twentieth century. She is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of postcolonial theory, along with Edward W. Said and Homi K. Bhabha, but she is also a leading translator and commentator on the thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, and has made important contributions to debates about the future of comparative literature and the structural inequalities of neoliberal globalization. Born and educated in Kolkata, India, Spivak moved to the United States in the 1960s to study under the American literary critic Paul de Man at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her dissertation was on the poetry of W. B. Yeats. But it was Spivak's English translation of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida's
De la Grammatologie
in 1976 that established her reputation as a deconstructive critic. Spivak went on to write articles on Marxism and deconstruction and French feminist thought in the 1980s for journals such as
diacritics
and
Critical Inquiry;
she subsequently became involved in a critical dialogue with the Subaltern Studies historians, a group of historians who sought to challenge the elitism of South Asian historiography by examining historical events from the standpoint of the subaltern or the socially excluded in South Asian society. One of Spivak's most well known essays is “Can the subaltern speak?” (1995a [1988]), an essay which offers a deconstructive reading of the term “representation” in Marx's
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
, and applies this reading to Hindu scriptures and colonial archives on the practice of
sati
‐suicide in colonial India. It is perhaps this essay and Spivak's collection of interviews
The Postcolonial Critic
which have established her as a prominent postcolonial critic. Spivak is, however, uneasy with this label, and this uneasiness is signaled in the title of her magnum opus,
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present
(1999), a book that interrogates the emancipatory claims of postcolonial studies in the context of the depredations of global capitalism. More recently in
Death of a Discipline
(2003a), a book of essays based on a lecture series delivered at the University California at Irvine, Spivak has sought to define a political vocation for comparative literature by focusing on subaltern languages as active cultural media for interrupting the corporate agenda of global development.
V
izenor,
G
erald
Authors: Snyder Michael
Published: May 2017

Gerald Robert Vizenor (b. 1934) is a prolific and influential Native American novelist, poet, critic, theorist, editor, and professor of mixed Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), French, and Scandinavian ancestry. With much sophistication, his work has deconstructed the semiotics of the Indian and Indianness, analyzed Native American literature and culture, critiqued visual and textual representations of Native Americans, and examined social, political, and legal issues affecting them. A practitioner of what he calls “trickster discourse,” he has theorized and celebrated what he has termed the “crossblood,” emphasizing qualities of positive fluidity and Native transmotion over tragic tropes of the mixedblood found in American literature and film. He has theorized Native survivance, a sustained and complex indigenous cultural continuance, against notions of tragic victimry.
Žižek,Slavoj
Authors: Mousoutzanis Aris
Published: May 2017

Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher whose work has been increasingly popular and widely discussed since the publication of his first book in English,The Sublime Object of Ideology, in 1989, primarily for two reasons. The first is Žižek's unique ability to combine discussions on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and politics, and provide original reinterpretations of the work of intellectual figures such as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. The second is his very characteristic and idiosyncratic writing style, which manages to combine references to “high theory” and popular culture, obscene jokes and Continental philosophy, personal anecdotes and political theory. A text by Žižek will easily move from a discussion of psychoanalysis to the video clips of Michael Jackson, from the nature of totalitarianism to the differences between European lavatories, and from German idealism to Marlboro ads. There has always been an iconoclastic element in his work and a tendency to challenge and subvert dominant assumptions about his topic, an attitude that has been seen as related to his own personal and professional background. For Terry Eagleton, for instance, it is the fact that Žižek comes from a former Communist country that explains his concern with challenging authority and the establishment: “No acolyte of Lacan from Paris or Pittsburgh would have anything like Žižek's political nous, a faculty you develop spontaneously in a place where the political is the color of everyday life” (Eagleton 2003: 201). Tony Myers, on the other hand, has seen Žižek's intellectual development as always characterized by “a distance or heterogeneity to the official culture within which he works”: “He has always been a stain or point of opacity within the ruling orthodoxy and is never fully integrated by the social or philosophical conventions against which he operates” (Myers 2003: 10).
A
li,
T
ariq
Authors: Parker Tracey K.
Published: May 2017

Tariq Ali is a prominent political commentator, novelist, and playwright, perhaps best known for his work with the New Left. Born in Lahore (then part of the British Indian empire) in 1943, Ali lived in Pakistan until he was exiled in the 1960s for his political activism against the country's military dictatorship. He moved to England and attended Oxford University, where he continued his Trotskyist political activism, including protesting the Vietnam War. Ali became an editor of the socialist journal
The New Left Review
, and he is a regular contributor to BBC radio and the
Guardian
newspaper.
B
audrillard,
J
ean
Authors: Gómez Rocío
Published: May 2017

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a leading French social theorist, combining Marxism and poststructuralism to produce a trenchant and influential critique of the era of postmodernism that has proved widely influential in discussions of contemporary consumerist society. With the growth of communications technology in the late twentieth century, specifically television and the news media, the manner in which society processed readily available information was a source of study for sociologists and cultural observers alike. Witness to the growing union between technology and information, Baudrillard and his theories reflected the prevailing uneasiness of society and its (in)ability to process what appeared on television sets. He writes of information as “an unintelligent missile which never finds its target … and therefore crashes anywhere or gets lost in space” (1995: 42). The globalization of media and information were fundamental to Baudrillard's theories, which offered a unique approach to the internalization of images and simulations. Yet, there is a rawness to Baudrillard that is unsettling for some readers. Mike Gane cautions, “Baudrillard is a cruel, theoretical extremist, and must be read accordingly. He follows the logic of his own position” (1991a: 7). Nonetheless, combining his background in early French postmodernism and sociology, Baudrillard's analyses of media and its simulation have had profound effects throughout critical circles, sociological studies, and even environmental studies.
Bloch,Ernst
Authors: Rankin Sandy
Published: May 2017

Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) was a German Marxist philosopher and cultural critic who developed a utopian hermeneutic that influenced the New Left of the 1960s and ‘70s. His work continues to influence literary and cultural theorists, particularly Marxists and those who have an interest in science fiction, fantasy, fairytales, film studies, and popular culture in general. Bloch saw in all cultural artifacts not only the projections of ruling‐class ideology, but also projections of a collective socialist‐utopian unconscious, which he called the “not‐yet conscious” or, alternatively, the “hope principle.” Furthermore, he argued that art is for the sake of hope, rather than for the sake of art. Bloch's publications include numerous essays and 14 books, the best known of which is the three‐volumeThe Principle of Hope(1986[1959]), consisting of more than 1,500 pages. It is an encyclopedic investigation of daydreams, political and social utopias, philosophy, religion, fairytales, myths, architecture, and popular culture.
B
ordo,
S
usan
Authors: Waters Melanie
Published: May 2017

Born in 1947, Susan Bordo received her PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1982, and has since established herself as one of America's foremost feminist philosophers. She currently holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky. While Bordo's work encompasses a wide range of influences, her publications are prevailingly concerned with analyzing and interrogating the complex intersections of gender, embodiment, consumerism, and popular culture. These themes lie at the heart of her groundbreaking critique of identity and representation in
Unbearable Weight
(2003[1993]), a study which telegraphed her status as a key figure in the emergent, cross‐disciplinary field of “body studies.”
de Certeau,Michel
Authors: Burns Jeremy J.
Published: May 2017

Michel de Certeau (1925–86) was an influential French thinker whose theories have had lasting importance in the fields of historiography and cultural studies. Born in Chambery, France, de Certeau studied at the universities of Grenoble, Paris, and Lyon from 1944 to 1950, earning degrees in classics and philosophy. At the age of 25, he joined the Society of Jesus and was ordained as a priest in 1956. After some time working abroad, de Certeau returned to graduate study at the Sorbonne and completed a doctorate in religious sciences, in order to study the early history of the Jesuit Order. He witnessed the social unrest in France in May 1968, and documented these events in a series of articles. Later that same year, these articles were collected intoThe Capture of Speech(1997[1968]), a book for which de Certeau gained a good deal of public recognition. In many ways, the events of May 1968 and the subsequent publication of TheCapturemark a general broadening of de Certeau's work to include cultural studies. Over the course of his career, he held teaching positions at several prominent universities, including the Universite de Paris‐Vincennes, the University of California, San Diego, and the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris.