People sometimes criticize us for using complicated words "to be trendy." That's not just malicious, it's stupid. A concept sometimes needs a new word to express it, sometimes it uses an everyday word that gives it a singular sense. -- Gilles Deleuze
Agency
In a broad sense, agency refers to the capacity to act. For example in traditional adventure narratives, the male typically acts while women admire or reflect on men's actions. As this example indicates, agency is relative (women also act, but in a subordinate capacity), and often split along gender lines, especially before the influence of Second Wave Feminism. "Sexual Agency" refers to a person who asserts their desires (the sexual agent) as opposed to the sexual object. (Hedges)
Amodern
A term used by Bruno Latour to challenge the concepts that undergird modernist thought, while the same time avoiding the facile assumptions he believes are usually associated with "post-modernism."
Anagnorisis
Also see Aristotle: Key Concepts
Axiology
The branch of literary and cultural analysis that deals with evaluation, and tries to determine if something is "good" or "bad" and why. This activity is what many people (unfortunately) think of when they hear the term "criticism." A critic's job, in this popular image, is to criticize: not to think about something's meaning, but to tell us how it fails. (Hedges)
A pair of terms differentiated by their opposition to one another. Examples would include yin/yang, light/dark, masculine/feminine, up/down, and gay/straight, but also more subtle oppositions such as sea blue/cyan, vigilante/villain, and slacker/stoner. Saussure's linguistics imply that all language is organized by binary oppositions, and Derrida's thought maintains that these oppositions are unstable. Deconstruction demonstrates this underlying instability or play in binary oppositions. (Hedges)
A cultural practice that takes norms and standards so seriously that they become ridiculous and the privileges attached to them unreasonable. See Reflections on Camp and the Irony Taxonomy (Hedges)
Catharsis / Katharsis
Also see Aristotle: Key Concepts
When a work has a sense of finality, completeness, and resolution when you finish it, we say that it has a high degree of closure. If there is a sense that all the loose ends have not been tied up, and that issues remain unresolved or perhaps unresolvable, then we say it resists closure or doesn't have much closure. A play or novel where everyone is happily married at the end and vilians are disposed of has a lot of closure. A TV series like the X-files has very little closure. (Hedges)
A diachronic approach involves an examination of origins, development, history and change. For example if we examine the etymology of a word, or the development of a genre. Diachronic approaches give us a history, like a motion picture documentary. They focus on how things change over time. (Hedges)
In contrast, a synchronic approach gives us a snapshot of a particular system at a particular moment in time, like a snapshot. For example we might note how a word is distinguished from other words at the moment. Synchronic approaches focus on how a given system is at a given moment and how each part fits into the system. Structuralism relies on a synchronic approach. (Hedges)
Michel Foucault uses this term for an authoritative way of describing. Discourses are propagated by specific institutions and divide up the world in specific ways. For example, we can talk of medical, legal, and psychological discourses. Literary criticism is also a discourse, as is the terminology associated with grading. (Hedges)
Egalitarian Fallacy
A term coined by Barbara Herrnstein Smith to critique the notion that "relativism" implies all opinions are equally valid. In her 1998 book, Belief & Resistance, she describes it as follows: "much of the sense of intellectual and moral scandal evoked by the charge of "relativism" derives from a supposed implication . . . that, according to the skeptical or unorthodox doctrine in question, everything-every opinion, every scientific theory, every artwork, every social practice, and so on- is 'just as good' as every other
I call this general supposition and argument the Egalitarian Fallacy. It is a fallacy because, if someone rejects the notion of validity in the classic (objectivist) sense, what follows is not that she thinks all theories (and so on) are equally valid but that she thinks no theory (and so on) is valid in the classic sense. The non sequitur here is the product of the common and commonly unshakable conviction that differences of "better" and "worse" must be objective or could not otherwise be measured. When appealed to in the argument the conviction is obviously question-begging" (77-78).
The notion that some "core" meaning or identity is determinate and not subject to interpretation. (For example, a crayon that is always "green" regardless of other crayons it is placed with, would be "essentially" green--no matter what its context.) Essentialism usually comes up in debates about personal identity. Is there, for instance, an essential "feminine" that transcends histories and cultures? (Hedges)
Gothic
In literary and cultural studies, the gothic is a genre or mode whose dark imagery often includes medieval ruins, supernatural occurrences, and demonic protagonists. Gothic themes usually emphasize the persistence of the past and history's grip on the present (as opposed to rosier views of human progress and the possibility of social perfection), and take place against a backdrop where few characters are innocent, and most of them are damned. Gothic narratives often stress embodiment, with all its attendant possibilities for sensation, as well as the fear of mortification and decay. Gothic narratives also typically explore themes that are otherwise cordoned off as unnatural or perverse (consider, for example, Frankenstein's unnatural monster, or Batman's rubber suit). (Hedges)
Hamartia
Also see Aristotle: Key Concepts
A name the New Critics gave to the belief that an author's intentions (stated or inferred) is the final court of appeal about the meaning of a text. There are two main objections to this commonsense belief: 1> How do you determine an author's intent, especially if they are dead? 2> People often express things they don't intend to; subconscious or other meanings may slip out. This is not to say that an author's intentions are irrelevant to the text, but that any statements about her or his intent must be subjected to the same scrutiny and are subject to the same interpretive process as the text itself. (Hedges)
Also see the Irony Taxonomy
Male Gaze
A film theory widely circulated during the mid to late 1980s. It posited that the camera structured things from a male viewpoint, inviting men in the audience to identify with male protagonists' actions, while women in the movies were typically passive, vitimized, or peripheral to the main action. The term Gaze originally comes from Lacan, although influential Lacanians have maintained that it is improperly used in this theory. (Hedges)
Mimesis
Also see Aristotle: Key Concepts
Mirror Stage
Lacan's mirror stage is perhaps best understood as a metaphor for subjectivity. In the mirror stage, the fragmented infant identifies with and desires to be like an image of wholeness (the image in the mirror, the "I" or subject position that implies a coherent, unified, subjectivity). But while images of wholeness give us an image of ourselves as distinct from the world, they never align with us perfectly. There is an inevitable, structural, gap between the truth of fragmentation (a body that constantly takes in and spews out matter, a consciousness riven by representations) and images of self-identity and wholeness. (Hedges)
Oedipus Complex (Lacanian)
In the Oedipal Complex, as Lacan imagines it, the subject passes from a register of imaginary fusions with the world and with others (The Imaginary) into language (the Symbolic). Lacan almost describes this as a fall from Eden presence and fusion with the world into a post-lapsarian world of subject and object, division and desire.
Lacan's notion of desire is, at its heart, a desire for wholeness--a "hole in the self" that the subject attempts to close through an endless, metonymic chain of supplements: the perfect car, the perfect boyfriend, a tenure track job, etc. But as soon as one supplement is acquired, desire moves onto something else. Desire is a (representational) itch that can never truly be scratched. (Hedges)
(The) Other
A term from French philosophy that has several, sometimes overlapping meanings in cultural studies, including anthropology and psychoanalysis.
1 Most commonly, another person or group of people who are defined as different or even sub-human to consolidate a group's identity. For example, the Nazi's internal cohesion depended in part on how they defined themselves against (strove to maintain distinctions from) their image of the Jews. In this sense, "The other" is the devalued half of a binary opposition when it is applied to groups of people. (See binary opposition.)
2 A "specular" other. In the thought of Jacques Lacan, human infants have an image of themselves as whole before they actually have control over their bodies. This "mirror phase" in their development gives them an image of wholeness to strive for, but it is also alienating because the image in the mirror does not match their burping, defecating reality. Presumably we might spend our entire life trying to achieve a kind of wholeness and integration, this time on a psychic level, that is ultimately at odds with how our brains and bodies, and certainly language, works. For this reason, images of our doubles may be experienced as threatening and sinister (see Dopplegänger).
3 The "symbolic" Other. The Other that is always capitalized. For Jacques Lacan and many other French philosophers, to be is to speak, but to speak is use a system of representations that precede us. To the extent that our inner thought processes (how we represent ourselves and our experience to ourselves) are shaped by language, we are as much "spoken" or "inscribed" as we are speaking. In this account, our consciousness is created by a kind of intrusion from the outside, a kind of alien Other that structures our subjectivity.
(Hedges--I think this owes a lot to The Feminist Dictionary of Psychoanalysis)
Overdetermined
A term from psychoanalysis. If something is "Overdetermined," it is possible to construct several plausible, non-mutually exclusive ways to explain it. In such cases, we might use the expression "both . . . and" instead of "either . . . or." (Hedges)
A term coined by J. L. Austin. A performative is a semiotic gesture that is a being as well as a doing. Or, more accurately, it is a doing that constitutes a being, an activity that creates what it describes.
Performatives are intelligible only within a matrix that is simultaneously social and semiotic. To borrow one of Austin's own examples of a performative, "I pronounce you man and wife" both performs an action and describes a new state of being. A minister or magistrate's act of describing a couple as "man and wife" is what makes them so. However, as Austin himself pointed out, this performative depends on a densely woven web of social relations that renders it intelligible, believable, and acceptable. Shift the context of the utterance a little, say by having someone other than a minister or magistrate say it, or by directing it at a pair of cats, and it loses its cultural authority. As Judith Butler has pointed out such a shift can also parody the dominant conventions, revealing that they are, in fact, conventions. Directed at a pair of women lovers, "I now pronounce you man and wife," mimics a heterosexual institution but also displaces it, troubling dominant notions of what it means to be male, female, and married. (Hedges, from an unpublished article)
Also see JL Austin: Key Concepts
Peripeteia
Also see Aristotle: Key Concepts
The Phallus
While all of them agree it's important, some critics say the term "the Phallus" in Lacan's work has as many as eight meanings and some as few as one meaning. One thing everyone pretty much agrees on, though, is that Lacan tries to maintain a distinction between the Phallus as a signifier privileged male attributes, and the penis, as a spongy little organ that can't live up to the Phallus's inflated claims. (Hedges)
Postmodernism
Power/Knowledge
A term Foucault uses to highlight the fact that every description also regulates what it describes. It is not only that every description is somewhat "biased, " but also that the very terms used to describe something reflect power relations. Discourses promote specific kinds of power relations, usually favoring the "neutral" person or professional using the discourse (the lawyer, psychiatrist, professor, doctor, etc.). In other words, to know is to participate in complicated webs of power. (Hedges)
Primal Scene
The scenario people imagine when they try to contemplate their own origins. The term is a Freudian one, and in that context refers to imagining your parents conceiving you, but can be used more loosely to refer to any such scene of origin. (Hedges)
Queer
Queerness, in the work of theorists like Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, is as much a semiotic as it is a social phenomenon. To say that someone is "queer" indicates an indeterminacy or indecipherability about their sexuality and gender, a sense that they cannot be categorized without a careful contextual examination and, perhaps, a whole new rubric. For gender to be, in Judith Butler's words, "intelligible," ancillary traits and behaviors must divide and align themselves beneath a master division between male and female anatomy.
From people's anatomy, we can supposedly infer other things about them: the gender of the people they desire, the sartorial and sexual practices they engage in, the general elements of culture that they are attracted to or repulsed by, and the gender of their "primary identification." While in practice each of these categories is rather elastic, it is usually when they do not line up in expected ways (say, when a man wears a dress and desires men) that one crosses from normative spaces into "queer" ones. In Butler's view, queer activities like drag and unexpected identifications and sexual practices reveal the arbitrariness of conventional gender distinctions by parodying them to the point where they become ridiculous or ineffective.
(Hedges, from his article, "Howells's 'Wretched Fetishes': Character, Realism, and Other Modern Instances." Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 38.1 Spring1996.)
"A copy for which there is no original." Examples would include the hacienda that Taco Bell stores are based on, Disneyland, MGM Studios, sex in pornography, and 40s "retro" fashions. The point isn't that there aren't "real life" models for these things--we could find a mission church similar to the Taco Bell store--but that the model becomes more important than any original we might discover. For example, in pornography you have highly scripted, often impossible sex that people then attempt to emulate in their lives. The representation becomes more important than the "thing itself." The signifier becomes more important than the signified. The term is central to the work of Baudrillard, althought Deleuze wrote about it much earlier. (Hedges, with thanks to Steve Krause for the Taco Bell example)
Subject
Foucault, Benveniste, Lacan and other thinkers have attracted the attention of philosophers and cultural critics because they think about the way that language shapes subjectivity. That is why they use the term "subject" (a position in a sentence) rather than "person." Presumably, we come to know ourselves as distinct identities by interacting with a system of representation that precedes us. For example, we are gendered by language at birth ("what is it?--blue cigars or pink ones?") (Hedges)
The Subject Supposed to Know
In the theories of French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, a putative subject occupying a representational vantage point from which complete, as opposed to fragmentary, knowledge is possible. As Robert Frost wrote, "We all dance round and suppose,/ but the secret sits in the middle and knows." Lacan's point is that because of the nature of language, all knowledge is necessarily incomplete, lacking, and flawed, and this subject is an illusion, although often a necessary one. (Hedges)
Textual "Poaching"
A term popularized by the critic Henry Jenkins. The notion is that readers and viewers aren't simply passive consumers of texts and shows, but "poach" those elements which are meaningful to them, often going so far as to engage in an ongoing struggle with producers over a text or show's meanings, direction, and significance. I particularly like the metaphor of poaching because it conjures up images of wandering around an area that officially does not "belong" to you and using what you find there for your own purposes, much as fans do with characters, even a universe, that purportedly belongs to someone else. (Hedges)
In the past, Formalist analysis often climaxed by demonstrating how a work of art appealed to a universal human experience or feeling. As more people from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds have entered the academy, it has become much more difficult to appeal to universal human experiences or characteristics. This is not to denigrate any one's belief in universal human experiences or a common human nature. But if you hinge an essay on such a belief, then the focus of your discussion shifts away from your point about the literature, and toward the much larger task of convincing your audience that such universal experience exists (which you're unlikely to do in a 5 to 15 page paper). (Hedges)
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