A Glossary of Literary and Cultural Theory

Peter Brooker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317354765
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Glossary of Literary and Cultural Theory provides researchers and students with an up-to-date guide through the vibrant and changing debates in Literary and Cultural Studies. In a field where meanings are frequently complex and ambiguous, this text is remarkable for its clarity and usefulness. This third edition includes 17 entirely new entries and updates to more than a dozen others which address key concepts and contemporary positions in both literary and cultural theory. New entries include:

• Actor Network Theory

• Anthropocene

• Ecocriticism

• Digital Humanities

• Postcapitalism

• World Literature

CLASSIFICATION OF KEYWORDS ACCORDING TO MOVEMENTS AND FIELDS

FEMINISM

Androgyny; body; chora; compulsory heterosexuality; cyberfeminism; cyborg; desire; différance; difference; écriture féminine; essentialism; excess; fetishism; flâneuse; gaze; gender; gynesis; gynocriticism; ideology; imaginary; jouissance; masquerade; ‘men in feminism’; nomadism; patriarchy; performativity; phallocentric; pleasure; posthuman; queer theory; reproduction; semiotic; sexual difference; sexuality; subject; symbolic; transgressive; utopia.

FILM, MEDIA, POPULAR CULTURE

Addresser/addressee; articulation; audience; code; communication; convergence; cult; cultural intermediaries; culture industries; flow; gatekeeping; gaze; genre; image; kitsch; mass; message; mise-en-scène; montage; narrative; negotiation; pop; popular; populism; reception; scheduling; suture.

FORM AND MODE

Aesthetic; affect; allegory; aura; author; autonomy; avant-garde; camp; canon; closure; defamiliarization; digital; ecocriticism; écriture; elite; estrangement; fantasy; formalism; genre; Gothic; hermeneutics; hyperreality; icon; image; interpretive community; kitsch; metafiction; modernism; montage; narrative; nature; popular; post-theory; readerly/writerly; reading; realism; rhizome; taste; textuality; trauma; utopia; value; world literature.

MARXISM

Agency; alienation; alienation effect; base and superstructure; capital; class; colonialism; commodity fetishism; conjuncture; consciousness; consumerism; critical theory; critique; dialectics; dominant; enlightenment; hegemony; historicism; humanism; ideological state apparatus; ideology; ideology critique; imperialism; interpellation; jetztzeit; mass; materialism; nationalism; postcapitalism; post-Marxism; production; reification; relative autonomy; reproduction; totality; utopia; value.

POSTMODERNISM/POSTCOLONIALISM

City; deterritorialization; ethics; ethnicity; flow; globalization; hybridity; hyperreality; local; modernism; modernity; nationalism; nostalgia; orientalism; parody; pastiche; post-Fordism; posthuman; psychogeography; queer theory; race; simulation; space; spectacle; syncretism; thirdspace; totality; virtual reality.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

Condensation and displacement; desire; dreamwork; excess; fantasy; fetishism; gaze; imaginary; mirror-stage; misrecognition; Nachträglichkeit; Oedipal complex; other; phallus; schizoanalysis; sexuality; subject; suture; symbolic; transference; trauma; uncanny; unconscious.

SOCIETY, POLITICS

Actor network theory; animal studies; anthropocene; body; capitalism; citizenship; city; civil society; class; common culture; community; consumerism; cosmopolitanism/cosmopolitics; counter-culture; cultural politics; culturalism; culture industries; diaspora; distinction; ecology; elite; establishment; ethics; ethnicity; ethnography; everyday life; field; flâneur; formation; globalization; governmentality; habitus; homo sacer; hybridity; identity; ideology; incorporation; intellectuals; liminality; local; modernity; multiculturalism; place; postcapitalism; public sphere; reflexive modernization; site; structure of feeling; subculture; symbolic violence; taste; terrorism; tourism.

STRUCTURALISM, POSTSTRUCTURALISM, DISCOURSE

Alterity; aporia; archaeology; archive; articulation; author; bricolage; closure; code; deconstruction; deterritorialization; diachronic/synchronic; dialogics; différance; difference; discourse; dissemination; écriture; épistème; ethics; excess; the event; genealogy; governmentality; heteroglossia; heterotopia; intertextuality; jouissance; langue; metanarrative; metaphysics of presence; mise-en-abyme; narrative; nomadism; parole; pleasure; power; readerly; rhizome; sign; subject; supplement; suture; synchronic; synergy; textuality; trace; translation.

TECHNOLOGY, CULTURE

Anthropocene; chaos; communication; cybernetics; cyberspace; cyborg, digital; digital humanities; hypertext; internet; message; network; robotics; thing theory.

ABJECTION

A term developed by Julia Kristeva (1982) to name the horror of being unable to distinguish between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ of which the first, primary instance is the embryo’s existence in the mother’s body. The abject is what the subject seeks to expel in order to achieve an independent identity, but this is impossible since the body cannot cease both to take in and expel objects. The latter include tears, faeces, urine, vomit, mucus, which in the infant are the SITE of future erogenous zones as well as of cultural taboos. The abject is a troubled marker between the unclean and clean, and between the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal, the sign of an undecidable boundary line between the inside and the outside of the body, and therefore of a divided subject: it is, says Kristeva, the ‘in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (1982: 4).

Significant borderline states occur with menstruation and pregnancy, and Kristeva examines the latter in ICONS of the mother-figure, especially in religious discourse, which she sees as uniquely tolerating the mother, notably in the figure of the Virgin Mary. The abject is also related to Kristeva’s concept of the SEMIOTIC, which is similarly associated with the domain of the maternal, the pre-signifying and pre-Oedipal. Although repressed, it is similarly never surpassed or silenced but intervenes to disrupt the SYMBOLIC order.

The concept of the abject has also been utilized in discussions of the GOTHIC and sci-fi horror genres. Barbara Creed, for example, discusses films such as The Thing, Alien and Aliens in these terms. Such films, she says, explore ‘the “bodies” of female alien creatures whose reproductive systems both resemble the human and are coded as a source of abject horror and overpowering awe’ (Brooker and Brooker [eds] 1997: 48). The monstrous or abject is the expelled but powerful feminine, even when, as in the film Videodrome, this metaphorically invades the male BODY. In further examples, the ‘abject maternal’ is explored by E. Ann Kaplan (1990) in a discussion of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, and Maud Ellman reads T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a text that reinscribes the personal, sexual, literary and social others (the waste) it tries to expel. ‘The Waste Land,’ she says, ‘is one of the most abject texts in English literature’ (Fletcher and Benjamin [eds] 1990: 181).

See also PSYCHOANALYSIS; UNCANNY.

ACTOR NETWORK THEORY

Actor Network Theory (commonly abbreviated as ANT) derives from the work of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law in the 1980s and took its impetus from a challenge to the dominant understanding of the special status of science and scientific knowledge. ANT sees the production of scientific knowledge as not unlike the operation of other social processes, which it understands as dynamic and collective networks. It opposes any a priori assumptions regarding such networks and does not distinguish, or accept a hierarchy, between nature and society, agency and structure, micro-content or macro-level context, or, most markedly and controversially, between human and non-human, towards which it exercises a principle of ‘generalized symmetry’.

As a method, ANT is therefore fundamentally deconstructive and relational. Networks are conceived as comprised of diverse participants and practices observed in process and interpreted by way of certain guiding terms. Thus ‘actants’ names participants whether human, animal, textual or technological, which enter into associations in which they exert agency and from which, in turn, forms of action, or definition or redefinition (both material and semiotic) are realised. Actants may indeed themselves comprise networks at the outset, that is to say, combinations of features or entities which then enter new assemblages. ANT is duly interested, therefore, in the forms and effects of association, carefully described as ‘juxtaposition’, ‘translation’ (the organization and conversion of entities), ‘transportation’ (the network’s becoming useful), ‘enrolment’ (how others are enlisted), how roles or ‘scripts’ emerge or are bestowed, and the way these processes are involved in the building or ‘stabilization’ of a given network or cluster of networks.

‘Translation’, describing how entities are ‘converted’; that is to say, brought through the process of dispute or dissension into alignment or agreement, appears as a core concept in this overall process since it establishes the convergence of the network and its influence or ‘success’. If tightly focused or ‘simplified’, the network is described as ‘puncturalized’. Even so, coherent and durable networks will need maintaining or reasserting by a ‘spokesperson’ in the face of outside competition.

ANT can provide a salutary realization that institutions, places of learning and work and cultural practices, such as a government or university department, a primary school or doctor’s clinic, the making of a film or the publication of a book, are composed of multiple interacting activities, personnel, units and technologies. However, its patient analysis can be dauntingly precise in its use of terms and has been seen as limited to a description of network formation rather than providing a critical analysis of power relations inherent in such structures. There have also been long-standing reservations about the attribution of agency to non-human objects or entities (see Winner 1993), although it should be noted that ANT does not ascribe ‘intentionality’ to the non-human.

Bruno Latour famously rang the death knell on ANT in an address in the late 1990s when he announced ‘that there are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen! Four nails in the coffin’ (Latour 1999). He has returned to its defence, however, in his Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005). Here, Latour appears to be concerned above all to polemicize against Sociology’s continued adherence to what he considers the a priori, static and homogenizing concept of ‘the social’ or ‘social context’, rather than his preferred notion of dynamic ‘associations’. But he also directly addresses questions of power, inequality and a deteriorating environment. ‘Critical Sociology’, he contends, can, as presently constituted, have little purchase on such issues.

See also DETERRITORIALIZATION; RHIZOME; SPECULATIVE REALISM; THING THEORY.

ADDRESSER/ADDRESSEE

The participants in the standard model of COMMUNICATION between whom a MESSAGE is passed. Sometimes, particularly in earlier representations of this model, addresser and addressee are understood as equivalent to ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’. However, it is important to maintain a distinction between an actual sender of a message, and the position or role of the addresser, as well as between an actual receiver and addressee. Thus, as is commonly recognized, a novelist as private citizen cannot be identified with the narrator of a novel; or even, straightforwardly, with the name on the cover of his/her book, since this bestows the public persona of ‘AUTHOR’ (involved in contracts, copyrights and so on) who is distinct from that person as a private individual, or in some other occupation (teacher, MP, actor). Also relevant here is the distinction first made in American literary criticism of the 1960s between the author, existing ‘outside’ the text, and the ‘implied author’ whose presence can be detected in the voice or presence working over and above the words of the narrator and characters ‘in’ the text. Furthermore, different individuals can occupy the same named role or office of addresser (as ‘headteacher’, ‘broadcaster’, ‘prime minister’, or in the common use of ‘spokespeople’).

A comparable distinction is necessary at the other end of the process of communication since the addressee, the person for whom the message is intended (an ‘implied’ or ‘ideal reader’, consumer or voter), may be quite different from the person who actually receives, decodes or interprets it. The actual recipient will be involved in a process of NEGOTIATION with the intended meaning of the message and the position of its ideal recipient or addressee. A further difference is that although senders may be a group or organization, there are often many, sometimes thousands or millions of actual receivers. This is clearest of all in MASS communications, and has led to attempts to theorize and empirically assess the range of responses and positions that actual viewers or listeners in an AUDIENCE might occupy. This does not rule out the usefulness of the concept of the addressee, however, since it is an indication of the ideological assumptions of programme makers about their audience and how this is inscribed in media texts. Actual audience members may also of course coincide with the constructed position of the addressee wholly or in part, whether on a given occasion or over a period of time.

See also ÉNONCÉ/ÉNONCIATION; READING; SCHEDULING.

AESTHETIC(S)

The term ‘aesthetic’ has both narrow and expanded uses. Thus, it can be used to name the formal or compositional aspect of a work of art as against its content, to refer to a coherent philosophy of art, or to the artistic dimension of culture as a whole. ‘Aesthetics’, meanwhile, embraces the study of any or all of these things. Traditionally, however, it has concerned itself with the nature, perception and judgement of beauty. The term was first used with this sense in the eighteenth century, and aesthetics has been a prominent part of German philosophy, most influentially in the work of Immanuel Kant. The tendency in this discussion has been to try to identify the transcendent and timeless aspects of beauty, and to discriminate against what is contingent and therefore not art. In this way, it has been allied to the discussion of cognate terms such as ‘genius’ and TASTE, and has operated in a similar fashion to the notion of the CANON.

Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) has argued that while seeking an essentializing and transcendent definition of art, this tradition has in fact served to buttress particular ideas of subjectivity, freedom, autonomy and universality, which make it ‘inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class society’ (1990: 3). Aesthetics, like art itself, therefore becomes an ideological and historically conditioned set of discourses.

This analysis does not seek to dispense with the realm of the aesthetic, but to provide it with a situated cultural...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Classification of keywords according to movements and fields
• Bibliography