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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory:
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.
Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. In early Western thought, Platonic idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form". In Categories, Aristotle similarly proposed that all objects have a substance that, as George Lakoff put it, "make the thing what it is, and without which it would be not that kind of thing". The contrary view—non-essentialism—denies the need to posit such an "essence". Essentialism has been controversial from its beginning. In the Parmenides dialogue, Plato depicts Socrates questioning the notion, suggesting that if we accept the idea that every beautiful thing or just action partakes of an essence to be beautiful or just, we must also accept the "existence of separate essences for hair, mud, and dirt".
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy, often witnessed within Western canon along with some postmodernist theory.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, caste, and social class. The term encompasses various often-populist political phenomena and rhetoric, such as governmental migration policies that regulate mobility and opportunity based on identities, left-wing agendas involving intersectional politics or class reductionism, and right-wing nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic "others."
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examines the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions (1982) can be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, and in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999), Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air.
Écriture féminine, or "women's writing", is a term coined by French feminist and literary theorist Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa". Cixous aimed to establish a genre of literary writing that deviates from traditional masculine styles of writing, one which examines the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text. This strand of feminist literary theory originated in France in the early 1970s through the works of Cixous and other theorists including Luce Irigaray, Chantal Chawaf, Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, and has subsequently been expanded upon by writers such as psychoanalytic theorist Bracha Ettinger. who emerged in this field in the early 1990s,
The Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) or Subaltern Studies Collective is a group of South Asian scholars interested in postcolonial and post-imperial societies. The term Subaltern Studies is sometimes also applied more broadly to others who share many of their views and they are often considered to be "exemplary of postcolonial studies" and as one of the most influential movements in the field. Their anti-essentialist approach is one of history from below, focused more on what happens among the masses at the base levels of society than among the elite.
Postmodern feminism is a mix of postmodernism and French feminism that rejects a universal female subject. The goal of postmodern feminism is to destabilize the patriarchal norms entrenched in society that have led to gender inequality. Postmodern feminists seek to accomplish this goal through opposing essentialism, philosophy, and universal truths in favor of embracing the differences that exist amongst women in order to demonstrate that not all women are the same. These ideologies are rejected by postmodern feminists because they believe if a universal truth is applied to all women of society, it minimizes individual experience, hence they warn women to be aware of ideas displayed as the norm in society since it may stem from masculine notions of how women should be portrayed.
Alterity is a philosophical and anthropological term meaning "otherness", that is, the "other of two". It is also increasingly being used in media to express something other than "sameness", or something outside of tradition or convention.
In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, subalterns are the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the common people who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.
Uma Narayan is an American feminist scholar and a current professor of philosophy at Vassar College on the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Humanities. Narayan's work focuses on the epistemology of the inequities involving postcolonial feminism.
Catherine Keller is a contemporary Christian theologian and Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University's Graduate Division of Religion. As a constructive theologian, Keller's work is oriented around social and ecological justice, poststructuralist theory, and feminist readings of scripture and theology. Both her early and her late work brings relational thinking into theology, focusing on the relational nature of the concept of the divine, and the forms of ecological interdependence within the framework of relational theology. Her work in process theology draws on the relational ontology of Alfred North Whitehead, fielding it in a postmodern, deconstructive framework.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic consequences of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The field started to emerge in the 1960s, as scholars from previously colonized countries began publishing on the lingering effects of colonialism, developing a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.
Naomi Schor was an American literary critic and theorist. A pioneer of feminist theory for her generation, she is regarded as one of the foremost scholars of French literature and critical theory of her time. Naomi's younger sister is the artist and writer Mira Schor.
This is a list of articles in continental philosophy.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education and Dean's Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. Mohanty, a postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist, has argued for the inclusion of a transnational approach in exploring women’s experiences across the world. She is author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, and co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism,, The Sage Handbook on Identities, and Feminist Freedom Warriors: Genealogies, Justice, Politics, and Hope.
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is a 2013 book by the American sociologist and New York University professor Vivek Chibber.
References
- ↑ G. Ritze and J.M. Ryan, ed. (2010). The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology. p. 193.
- ↑ Kurzwelly, J.; Rapport, N.; Spiegel, A. D. (2020). "Encountering, explaining and refuting essentialism". Anthropology Southern Africa . 43 (2): 65–81. doi:10.1080/23323256.2020.1780141. hdl: 10023/24669 . S2CID 221063562.
- ↑ B. Ashcroft; et al. (1998). Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies . pp. 159–60. ISBN 978-0-415-15304-1.
- ↑ Susan Abraham (2009). "Strategic Essentialism in Nationalist Discourses: Sketching a Feminist Agenda in the Study of Religion". Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 25 (1): 156–161. doi:10.2979/fsr.2009.25.1.156. S2CID 143105193 – via Project Muse.
- ↑ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2008). Other Asias. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. p. 260. ISBN 978-1405102070.
- ↑ G. Ritze and J.M. Ryan, ed. (2010). The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology. p. 619.
- ↑ Paddy Ladd (2003). Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Multilingual Matters Ltd. p. 81. ISBN 1-85359-546-2.
- ↑ Virpi Lehtinen (2014). Luce Irigaray's phenomenology of feminine being. State University of New York Press. p. 39.
