Animation is a filmmaking technique by which still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets (cels) to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animation has been recognized as an artistic medium, specifically within the entertainment industry. Many animations are computer animations made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Stop motion animation, in particular claymation, has continued to exist alongside these other forms.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory:
Deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances.
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism towards scientific rationalism and the concept of objective reality. It questions the "grand narratives" of modernity, rejects the certainty of knowledge and stable meaning, and acknowledges the influence of ideology in maintaining political power. Objective claims are dismissed as naïve realism, emphasizing the conditional nature of knowledge. Postmodernism embraces self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism. It opposes the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.
Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power. Although post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media within pre-established, socially constructed structures.
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
Hélène Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes, which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university. Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theatre, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.
Cartoon physics or animation physics are terms for a jocular system of laws of physics that supersedes the normal laws, used in animation for humorous effect.
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, first published in French in 1997 as Impostures intellectuelles, is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. As part of the so-called science wars, Sokal and Bricmont criticize postmodernism in academia for the misuse of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing.
The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies is a 1925 essay by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss that is the foundation of social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange.
Simulacra and Simulation is a 1981 philosophical treatise by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, in which he seeks to examine the relationships between reality, symbols, and society, in particular the significations and symbolism of culture and media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence.
The following is a bibliography of works by Jacques Derrida.
Of Grammatology is a 1967 book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The book, originating the idea of deconstruction, proposes that throughout continental philosophy, especially as philosophers engaged with linguistic and semiotic ideas, writing has been erroneously considered as derivative from speech, making it a "fall" from the real "full presence" of speech and the independent act of writing.
Hauntology is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost. The term is a neologism first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx. It has since been invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, anthropology, politics, fiction, and literary criticism.
A simulacrum is a representation or imitation of a person or thing. The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god. By the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original. Literary critic Fredric Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, in which a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real thing. Other art forms that play with simulacra include trompe-l'œil, pop art, Italian neorealism, and French New Wave.
Trace is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida used this concept in two of his early books, namely Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.
Alan N. Shapiro is an American science fiction and media theorist. He is a lecturer and essayist in the fields of science fiction studies, media theory, posthumanism, French philosophy, creative coding, technological art, sociology of culture, social choreography, software theory, robotics, artificial intelligence, and futuristic and transdisciplinary design. Shapiro's book and other published writings on Star Trek have contributed to a change in public perception about the importance of Star Trek for contemporary culture. His published essays on Jean Baudrillard - especially in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies - have contributed to a change in public perception about the importance of Baudrillard's work for culture, philosophy, sociology, and design.
William Rothman is an American film theorist and critic. Since receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1974, he has authored numerous books, including Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982), The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History and Aesthetic (1988), and Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy (2019). He was "part of a modern wave of thinkers to apply questions of philosophy to the medium of movies" during the 1980s, and his work contributed to the emergence of the sub-discipline that has come to be known as “film-philosophy.” Rothman has also written on aspects of film theory and on the writings of Stanley Cavell, an American philosopher who made film a major focus of his work. He is currently Professor of Cinematic Arts in the School of Communication at the University of Miami.
