CTSJ Jun Sem M

metonym

A type of figure in rhetoric in which a part of a thing, or something closely related to it, is used to represent that thing. For example 'the Oval Office' and 'the White House' are often used to represent the US Presidency. Similarly, 'Washington' is frequently used to represent the US government as a whole.

mode of production

Karl Marx created this concept to distinguish between different periods in history according to the varying ways in which the forces and relations of production were organized. Forces of production are the tools, machinery, and energy sources a society is able to put at its disposal, while the relations of production are the network of social rules regarding the ownership and the use of the forces of production (this distinction effectively corresponds to that between base and superstructure, which Marx also uses). Marx's thesis is that the composition of the economy—meaning, the relative forces available in a society and the distribution of access to those forces—conditions all other aspects of social life. As the great Marxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe has pointed out, for a society to have artists and shamans it must first of all produce sufficient surplus food to support non-producing members. The greater the amount of surplus it produces the greater its potential to focus on addressing wants rather than needs. Thus, for Marx the essential point of distinction between modes of production is the amount of surplus it generates and who benefits from that surplus. He identifies four modes of production, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and bourgeoisie, and prophesies a fifth, namely communism. He also speaks of three prehistorical modes of production corresponding to the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. In contemporary critical theory, this concept is used by Louis Althusser, and updated by Ernest Mandel, but probably its most widely debated incarnation is to be found in Fredric Jameson's account of postmodernism.

metacommentary

American cultural critic Fredric Jameson's term for his comparative analysis of competing interpretive methods. Jameson says that the metacommentary implies a model not unlike Sigmund Freud's conception of the relationship between the symptom and its underpinning, but repressed idea (minus his theory of the libido, of course). The content of a text is the distorted product of lived experience subject to censorship—there are always certain ideas, thoughts, phrases, and so forth that are not appropriate in a particular historical context so they have to be distorted to escape that censorship. This is Freud's basic idea for dream analysis: dreams are distorted images of our unconscious thoughts created in such a way as to escape censorship. So understanding a text means coming to grips with this process of censorship, which Jameson suggests can be accomplished by means of a reconstruction of its original context. What must be explained, then, is why a particular text had to be distorted in that way. A simple, literal example of this is the much discussed effects of the Hays Code on Hollywood: for instance, since the act of sex could not be depicted explicitly, visual metaphors for it had to be found, hence the famous smoking in bed scene following the first kiss which became a universal symbol of sex. In his later works, Jameson tends to use the term dialectical criticism rather than metacommentary to describe his analytic approach. See also transcoding.

Millet, Kate

American feminist scholar and activist best known for her book Sexual Politics (1970). Originally her PhD in English Literature at Columbia University, Sexual Politics offered a powerful critique of sexual inequality in western art and literature. She demonstrated the deeply embedded patriarchal values in the works of writers like D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer (who retaliated with a waspish essay denouncing political correctness in writing). By contrast, she argued, writers like Jean Genet offer a more nuanced account of the politics of sexuality. The book was an instant cause célèbre. Millett was featured on the cover of Time magazine and touted as the new face of feminism and though she soon ceased to be a 'media darling' because she was outed as bisexual her work was nevertheless a vanguard text in Second Wave feminism. However, despite being a committee member of the National Organization for Women, Millett did not pursue a position as spokeswoman for feminism, unlike Germaine Greer, whose own breakthrough bestseller The Female Eunuch (1970) was published in the same year as Sexual Politics. She continued to write, and contribute to feminist debate, but focused more on developing an artists' colony in upstate New York.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso

Italian author best known as the founder of Futurism. He shot to international prominence when his short and provocative text 'The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism' was published on the front page of the French daily newspaper Le Figaro in 1909. It celebrated art as violence, cruelty, and injustice; it called for the destruction of museums and libraries; and it glorified war as a kind of cultural hygiene. His reputation is, however, more than a little tarnished by his enthusiastic, albeit idealistic, support for Mussolini's fascist regime. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to make Futurism the official art of Italian fascism. Today Marinetti is generally remembered, particularly by Paul Virilio, as a prophet of speed.

myth

1 The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung proposed that the comparative study of myths could be used to understand and interpret the dreams and hallucinations of psychotic patients. For Jung myths are metaphors or dramatizations of the inner workings of the dimension of the psyche he calls the archetype, which in Jungian theory is the inherited part of the mind, namely our link to the collective unconscious. In a manner that Jung thought potentially therapeutic, myths illustrate to us the dangers of an archetype being given free rein. Myths can thus be treated as revelations of the structure of the pre-conscious psyche, that is, the psyche of pure archetypes as yet undomesticated by consciousness. The crucial implication here is that Jung assumes that the behaviour of the unconscious resembles the structure of myths, so when mythic elements appear in the course of treatment they are accorded a high level of significance. Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye adapts Jung's theory in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) to develop his own powerful form of analysis of literature as essentially mythic. 2 The great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss transformed the study of myth in a famous essay, 'The Structural Study of Myth' (1955), which asked the apparently innocent question: if the content of myths is contingent, if anything can be incorporated into a myth as seems apparent from the incredible richness of the world's vast collection of myths created throughout the centuries, then how do we account for their apparent similarity of form? Lévi-Strauss answers this question, which encapsulates the structuralist approach in a nutshell, by drawing on the insights of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who observed that similar sounds recur in different languages, but have different meanings and argued that in the case of spoken language it is the combination of sounds (i.e. the form) that is significant, not the specific sounds themselves (i.e. the content). Applied to myth, as Lévi-Strauss explains, this logic results in the almost completely opposite view to Jung—now the elements of a myth (the challenges the hero must face, the special powers brought to bear, and so on) can be considered significant only in terms of the combination of their relations with other elements and not for themselves. The specific combination of elements will vary from myth to myth, but the way of producing this combination is unique to myth and universal according to Lévi-Strauss. Myths have the following constitutive characteristics: they are timeless or simultaneously historical and ahistorical (e.g. as Benedict Anderson argues in his account of imagined communities, although nations are only a comparatively recent invention in history, they always present themselves as eternal, as having always been there); they are the opposite of poetry inasmuch as they can be translated from language to language, from one type of media to another, without loss of coherence or consequence (and thus, there is no such thing as the 'true' or 'original' form of a myth—the myth consists of all its variations taken together); and they are effective or performative (their telling is itself a kind of message). This last idea has been taken up by Fredric Jameson in Signatures of the Visible (1992) to suggest that contemporary Hollywood films can be read as symbolic solutions to real problems, and that is why cinema has such an important place in society today. 3 Inspired by Bertolt Brecht's concept of estrangement, French literary critic Roland Barthes developed a concept of myth as a critique of 'naturalness' (i.e. that which appears to simply occur without any historical determination, just as the sun does every morning). In a series of short essays initially published in the cultural journal, Les Lettres nouvelles, and subsequently republished in book form as Mythologies (1957), translated as Mythologies (1972), Barthes used myth as a codephrase for that which 'goes without saying' because it is so widely accepted as a 'truth', and by this means he tried to demonstrate that what passes for 'truth' is in fact the result of careful ideological stage-managing. As Barthes puts it in the afterword to Mythologies, the widely read essay 'Myth Today', myth's key principle is to transform history into nature. In the same essay, Barthes attempted to synthesize his theory of myth as follows: myth is a special type of speech (by which he means coded form of language use or communication); myth is not an object, idea, or concept, but rather a form of signification (it is a process rather than a thing); anything can be turned into a myth, though not everything is a myth (they are subject to history); myths are constructed from material that has already been worked on (they are a second-order or meta system that uses pre-existing symbols and icons); myths are not universal, they have to be dealt with in the specificity. Myths can thus take a variety of different forms—at the end of his essay, Barthes lists seven common varieties, all of which can be found in abundance in virtually any newspaper.

metaphor

A figure in rhetoric in which the meaning of one word is transferred onto and in a certain sense combined with that of another. It is constructed in the same manner as a simile, but the comparative terms 'like' and 'as' are removed. So instead of saying 'that man behaves like a pig' one says 'that man is a pig' and in so doing the attributes of the pig (generally the disagreeable ones) are transposed onto the man. Metaphors can also take extended forms, from a few a paragraphs to entire books—Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), for instance, is often read as an extended metaphor for imperialism and its effects.

Marxist Criticism

A form of cultural criticism that applies Marxist theory to the interpretation of cultural texts. Since neither Karl Marx nor his collaborator Friedrich Engels ever developed a specific form of cultural criticism themselves, Marxist Criticism has been extrapolated from their writings. As there is no one form of Marxism, so there is no one form of Marxist Criticism. This is not to say that the different variants of Marxist Criticism do not have certain features in common, but it is nevertheless also true that there is considerable debate within the field concerning those differences. In common, then, all forms of Marxist Criticism assume the following: (i) that no artistic object can be understood in isolation from the social, cultural, and historical conditions in which it was produced; (ii) that all categories by which artistic objects might be measured are themselves constructions that need to be evaluated from the perspective of the social, cultural, and historical conditions that gave rise to them; (iii) that all artistic productions are commodities that can and must be understood in terms of the production of surplus value; (iv) that art is a site for the playing out of a symbolic form of class struggle. The principle area of difference in Marxist Criticism is the issue of whether or not it should be prescriptive or not: in other words, is it the job of Marxist Criticism to determine what art should be like? There have been powerful movements in favour of this position—the most noted is of course socialist realism. This position has also been championed very strongly by such critics as György Lukács. But there is a similarly powerful movement against it and in recent years it has generally been agreed that it is neither possible nor desirable to prescribe what art should be like. But if that isn't the task of Marxist Criticism, then what is? As is the case with psychoanalysis, the response to this question is twofold: there is an attempt to understand the nature of the object (i.e. what makes it art and why) and alongside it there is the attempt to understand the subject's response to particular art objects. In both cases, the primary conceptual tool is the notion of ideology. Some of the major Marxist critics are: Terry Eagleton, his Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) was immensely influential; Fredric Jameson, his Marxism and Form (1971), and more particularly The Political Unconscious (1981), are perhaps the most sophisticated attempts to synthesize the critical methodologies from a broad spectrum of approaches; Lukács, although a troubled figure, his History and Class Consciousness (1923) continues to be studied today and it is in many ways a foundational text for the field; Pierre Macherey, whose Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, translated as A Theory of Literary Production (1978), is generally regarded as the definitive application of Althusser's work to literature; and Raymond Williams, a hugely influential figure, particularly in the nascent field of Cultural Studies.

mythopoeic

A form of literature that has the structure, look and feel of a myth, but is in fact a contemporary creation rather than a story passed down by tradition. The word was created by one of the genre's great practitioners, J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings (1954-5). Although the bulk of mythopoeic texts tend to be works like Tolkien's, namely fantasy, this is not exclusively the case. As Richard Slotkin demonstrates in a powerful work, Regeneration through Violence (1974), works of so-called serious literature to do with the history of a nation can also be classified as mythopoeic. For example, the cycle of Rambo films taken together offer a potent counter-narrative to standard accounts of American history—in Rambo's universe the Vietnam War was won by its soldiers, but lost by the politicians.

mentality

A historical form of collective unconscious (extrapolated from Durkheim's idea of collective consciousness rather than Jung's own concept of collective unconscious) conceived by the Annales group of historians in France to explain how a large population of individual subjects can act and think in a similar fashion without direct coercion. The concept is particularly useful for characterizing the apparently spontaneous shift in national character that precedes revolutions. It is also used to discuss such longue durée processes as secularization.

misrecognition

A process of self-identification in which a subject assumes an identity they mistake for their own. The concept derives from Jacques Lacan's account of the mirror stage of childhood development in which the young child (under 18 months) sees itself in the mirror and mistakes that image for itself. While the image in the mirror is obviously an image of them, it isn't actually them, but the child fails to make this distinction. Thus the child's 'I' is the product of its imaginary and the result of an illusion. Marxist critic Louis Althusser adapts this idea in the development of his concept of interpellation, which holds that society constantly calls on its subjects to adopt a particular identity (citizen, consumer, voter, etc.). But in doing so the subject is alienated from their 'true' self.

McDonaldization

A process whereby all businesses and indeed institutions conform to the model of practice established by the fast-food chain giant McDonald's. American sociologist George Ritzer first proposed this thesis in his bestselling book The McDonaldization of Society (1993). Ritzer identifies four key features of McDonaldization which, adapting Max Weber for the postmodern era, he refers to as a rational system: its efficiency (the food fills you up quickly); calculability (transformation of quantity into quality); predictability (the product is the same everywhere from Boston to Beijing); and control through non-human technology (supply gives shape to demand). His complaint is that despite the productive advantages of rational systems, they give rise to numerous unintended disadvantages—e.g. the large scale potato and beef farms necessitated by the McDonald's menu and the unhealthy cost-cutting farming practices the low budget demands. Somewhat nostalgically and not all that persuasively, Ritzer suggests that what he calls 'premodern' businesses like 'mom and pop' grocery stores and privately run B&Bs can be considered to have escaped McDonalization. But this is naive: at the very least it overlooks the highly McDonaldized supply chains and service regulations such enterprises must adhere to. As persuasive as the anecdotal evidence is, Ritzer supplies very little detail on the degree to which society, rather than businesses and bureaucracies, is becoming McDonaldized. Ultimately, it is therefore a rather gloomy and impressionistic jeremiad against change.

metalepsis

A second-order device in rhetoric in which one metonym refers to another metonym as for example in the famous description of Helen of Troy as the 'face that launched a thousand ships'. In narratology, metalepsis refers to the collapsing of an embedded tale and the frame narrative, such as one often finds in postmodern metafiction (e.g. Italo Calvino).

may '68

A series of street protests that began in a number of universities in Paris but rapidly spread to incorporate a wide cross section of French society. Some historians estimate that as many as 10 million people participated in the mass strikes over the course of several weeks. Known by a variety of different epithets such as 'the events of May', and the 'long summer', May '68 was not a single event, but rather a series of events interlinked by a common theme or purpose, which is difficult to define but essentially boils down to a nationwide transformation of what Raymond Williams called, in a different context, the structure of feeling. For the first time in French history, workers and students (effectively the future managerial class, and therefore the class enemies of the workers) united together to stage their dissatisfaction with the state of French society and more especially the way it was governed. Whole sections of the workforce went out on strike, perhaps most notably the garbage collectors, with the result that Paris was soon inundated by trash piled high on street corners. The police did not know how to respond, and many peaceful marches became violent, the cobblestones in the older parts of Paris being turned into handy missiles. The reason these events, rather than the numerous other protest events that occurred that year around the world (e.g. 1968 was also the year of the so-called 'Prague Spring'), have such significance for critical theory is not clear, though in all likelihood it is simply a matter of it happening at a time when French theory was hegemonic. Consequently, the reflections of French critical and cultural theorists (e.g. Alain Badiou, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Aron) on their national situation were transformed by an international readership into thoughts of more universal significance. In particular they raised the question of whether resistance is possible and if change can be achieved by non-violent means. Interestingly, in French politics May '68 is often derided as 'nothing', but in such a way as to confirm that it really was 'something', although no one is ever quite sure what.

magical realism

A style of literature which integrates a realist mode of writing with fantastical or marvellous events treated as perfectly ordinary occurrences. The term derives from a mistranslation of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's notion 'lo real maravilloso' (marvellous reality), which occurs in the prologue to El Reino de este Mundo (1949), translated as The Kingdom of This World (1957), where it is used to characterize the life of the people Carpentier encountered on a visit to Haiti. The key here is that the aim is to describe a reality in which the magical is part of everyday life and not an extraordinary dimension. Thus, it should not be confused with either the fantastic (as Tzvetan Todorov defines it) or fantasy fiction, because its purpose is not simply to go beyond the bounds of realism. As is evident in the best-known examples of magical realism, namely Gabriel García Márquez's novel, Cien años de soledad (1967), translated as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), there is a distinct political purpose behind introducing the marvellous, which sets it apart from the merely fantastic. At its best, as in Márquez and Rushdie, but one can also cite the work of Mikhail Bulgakov, Angela Carter, and Günter Grass, the device of magical realism (as the Russian Formalists would undoubtedly call it) enables the writer to critique belief, memory, and the imagination as historical forces.

moral criticism

A tendency—rather than a recognized school—within literary criticism to judge literary works according to moral rather than formal principles. Moral criticism is not necessarily censorious or 'moralizing' in its approach, although it can be; nor does it necessarily imply a Christian perspective, although it often does. Moral critics include D. H. Lawrence, whose position was pagan, and extolled the virtue of 'life' as a force to be nourished through literature; T. S Eliot, who was Christian, and judged works in terms of their ability to clarify life, and give it meaning; F. R. Leavis, who thought literature should be 'improving', that by reading it one should become a better person. Moral criticism is also concerned with the 'seriousness' of a work and whether its purpose is worthy of its means—it is from this perspective than one speaks of such things as 'gratuitous' sex in a novel, or nudity in a film, when it isn't seen to serve the moral purpose of the narrative.

mimicry

A term used in Postcolonial Studies to describe the paradoxical (or doubly articulated) state of affairs in colonial countries whereby the colonial power desires its subjugated others, namely the indigenous population of the occupied country, to look or at least act the same as the occupiers and yet fear that very outcome because it would dilute their own sense of difference and superiority. Mimicry is thus, as Homi Bhabha theorizes, an ambivalent strategy whereby subaltern peoples simultaneously express their subservience to the more powerful and subvert that power by making mimicry seem like mockery. A contemporary form of this can be seen today in the way in which call centre jobs from Australia, the UK, US, and elsewhere are exported to India precisely because as a direct result of colonization there are operators there who can mimic English speakers from those countries.

Miller, J. Hillis

American literary critic (primarily a Victorianist) who was part of the group of scholars who were known as the Yale School of *deconstruction. Born in Virginia, Miller attended Oberlin College and Harvard University, graduating from the latter in 1952 with a PhD entitled Symbolic Imagery in Six Novels of Charles Dickens. His first appointment was to Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for 20 years, coming under the influence of Geneva School critic Georges Poulet, who advocated a phenomenologically inflected critique of consciousness. He then moved to Yale in 1972, where he stayed for 14 years, working with Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman (1929-2016), moving away from his strictly phenomenological interests towards deconstruction (as Derrida's various essays on Husserl show, these two approaches are not completely incompatible). He became a key popularizer of deconstruction, mediating its move out of French and Comparative Literature departments into more mainstream English departments. He then moved to the University of California Irvine, where the originator of deconstruction Jacques Derrida was based. In 1976, in a presentation at the annual MLA(Modern Languages Association) conference entitled 'The Critic as Host', Miller effectively summed up his view of deconstruction as a kind of parasitical practice which dwells within and feeds off, but also poisons, the text it is working on. The presentation became famous for the elegant, yet utterly comprehensive way it repudiated M. H. Abrams attempt to refute deconstruction and in the process showed that when it comes to the close reading of texts deconstruction is more than a match for its predecessor New Criticism. Miller's work tends to highlight the points of undecidability or tension in texts, showing that they never quite mean what they say, and somehow always mean more than they say.

modernism

An international artistic movement, encompassing all the arts from architecture to arts and crafts, film, and literature, that began in the latter part of the 19th century and finished in the middle of the 20th century. It falls between realism, which it repudiated, and postmodernism, which was faced with the task of trying to find something new and interesting to do after apparently every possible experiment had already been performed by its predecessor. And it encompasses, albeit uncertainly, a range of artistic movements, including: Abstractionism, Avant-gardism, constructivism, cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, and even Situationism (to list only a few of the many creative factions that flourished during this period). Its defining characteristic is captured by two famous phrases: Arthur Rimbaud's 'Il faut être absolument moderne!' (One must be absolutely modern!) and Ezra Pound's 'make it new', both of which enjoin artists to jettison tradition and experiment with the possibilities inherent in every medium, regardless of the apparent senselessness or indeed ugliness of the outcome. Pound's fellow American modernist Gertrude Stein thought that it was the duty of the work of art to strive for ugliness because only in that way could it be assured of being truly new (beauty being a lingering trace of past traditions). The stem word 'modern', which derives from the Latin 'modo' (meaning current or of the moment), has been in use for nearly two thousand years. Its usage until the middle of the 19th century was generally unmarked, signalling no particular privilege or significance save that of currency. In A Singular Modernity (2002), Fredric Jameson lists 14 different uses of the term modern from the Classical period up until the 1960s. The real question, then, he argues, is when and how did modern become the demand for the new? There is no straightforward answer to this question, but it is generally thought (although the details are hotly disputed) that modernism is the aesthetic complement of modernity (change in the social sphere) and that its drive for change is rooted in the disruptions to social life brought about by modernization (change in technology). That is to say, it was the changes in the conditions of daily life that enabled modernism to blossom. This argument, which was presented powerfully and persuasively by Marshall Berman in All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982), reflects certain historical facts: modernism was an urban aesthetic—it celebrated and agonized over the new forms of life (and the various problems they entail) that the crowded cities of industrializing Europe afforded. The key change was the alienation of individuals from their families, their villages, and their connection to the land: factory workers moved to the city to become wage-earners, but in doing so became separated from everything that they knew and took for granted. Industrialization was thus a powerful force of change: it changed the structure of cities, it created a new class of people (the proletariat) and new things to spend money on (commodities). Ultimately, though, it was the First World War which brought about the most sweeping changes: it literally killed off the hidebound traditionalism of the Victorian era and introduced a new sense of urgency about the need to live life for all that it had to offer. Sigmund Freud's theory of sexual repression struck a powerful chord with the post-war generation for precisely this reason: it sensed personal, social, and cultural constraints it was no longer prepared to accept or tolerate. It was in this flux that the first artists began to think of themselves as modernists and their art as modernism emerged. Modernism was not a singular enterprise: it varied according to history and geography, or to put it another way it did not occur in the same way or at the same time in all countries. It was inspired and repulsed by the political experiments of the period: communism, fascism, Nazism, and socialism. Paris led the way, through the work of its poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, and its painters Edouard Manet and Paul Cézanne, and because of them expatriates like James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky flocked there, further enhancing its reputation. But modernism was a properly global phenomenon, if predominantly a white Anglo-Saxon male phenomenon, and variants of it occurred on virtually every continent. The highpoints of modernism are for the most part still revered and avidly studied today.

McLuhan, Herbert Marshall

Canadian media theorist, one of the most influential intellectuals of his time. Born in Edmonton, McLuhan grew up in Winnipeg. He completed a BA and MA in English at the University of Manitoba, then he went to Cambridge to complete a PhD in English Literature. When he arrived in the UK he found that Cambridge did not recognize his Canadian degrees, so he was forced to start all over again. At Cambridge he studied under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis. He returned to North America in 1937 to take a position at St Louis University and continue working towards his PhD, which he finally completed in 1943. Published in 1951 as The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man McLuhan's thesis explores the changing nature of rhetoric in contemporary culture. In 1944 he returned to his native Canada, where he spent almost all of the remainder of his professional career. In the early 1950s McLuhan turned his attention increasingly towards communication and media, tracking the rise of what would later be known as the consumer society. McLuhan's career took off in the early 1960s with the publication of a number of books that would transform him into an academic superstar: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962); Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964); The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (1967), and War and Peace in the Global Village (1968). McLuhan's work saw past the content to the form—he grasped before almost anybody else that new media technology did not just mean new ways of distributing old or familiar content; it meant a whole new way of thinking and being in the world. His concept of the 'global village' has been widely adopted as a description of the world as it is in consequence of the processes of globalization. Consequently, although he died decades before the Internet became part of everyday life, he is generally seen as one of its key prophets. His work was enormously influential too on Cultural Studies, particularly in its formative stages.

Moscow Linguistic Circle

Discussion group founded by Roman Jakobson for the purpose of investigating the poetic function of language which, together with the St Petersburg-based Opoyaz, formed the core of Russian Formalism. Its membership included such key figures as Victor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov, who would both also play a major part in advancing the theoretical development of Russian Formalism. The group sought to connect poetics and linguistics to show you could not properly understand one in the absence of the other.

metafiction

Fiction that draws attention to and directly comments upon its status as fiction. Most often this takes the form of an intrusion of the 'author' into the work. One of the earliest and most celebrated cases of metafiction is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-7), which has the author commenting frequently on his failure to get on with telling the story. But it can also take the form of a work of fiction about either the reading or writing of fiction, as one finds (again quite famously) in Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggatore (1979), translated as If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1981). The device is more common in late 20th-century fiction writing than it is in earlier periods and for this reason is often associated with postmodernism, although there is no direct correlation between the two. The device can also be witnessed in film and television.

Metz, Christian

French film theorist. Metz introduced film studies to both structuralism and psychoanalysis and in the process helped initiate the establishment of film theory. Instead of asking what films mean, Metz set out to discover how they make meaning, and in doing so revolutionized the way film was written and thought about in the academy. Born in Béziers in southern France, Metz studied classical languages and ancient history at the École Normale Supérieure and then completed a doctorate in general linguistics at the Sorbonne. Always a cinephile, Metz began to think of ways of applying Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of language (then much in fashion in Paris thanks to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, among others) to cinema in order to deduce the universal syntax of narrative film. How, in other words, does a film tell a story in pictures? In the 1970s, realizing that the structuralist approach to film analysis he had adopted privileged the cinematic text over the audience, Metz began to incorporate the insights of psychoanalysis, particularly its Lacanian variant (itself already influenced by structuralism), so as to think through how viewers receive films. Metz hypothesized that films are the equivalent of dreams or hallucinations so Sigmund Freud's theory of the dreamwork can be applied directly to them. This has proved a highly influential suggestion. Metz's most important publications are Essai sur la signification au cinéma (1968), translated as Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (1980) and Le Signifiant imaginaire. Psychanalyse et cinema (1977), translated as The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1982).

Macherey, Pierre

French literary theorist. He was born in Belfort, in the Franche-Comté region. Macherey attended the École Normale Supérieure from 1958 to 1963, where he met Louis Althusser with whom he would work very closely for a number of years. He completed an MA in 1961 on Spinoza (a lifelong interest) under the direction of Georges Canguilhem. In 1962-3, Macherey, along with fellow students Étienne Balibar, Michel Pêcheux, and Jacques Rancière, undertook a year-long study of the then still relatively new critical methodology structuralism under the direction of Althusser. Next the group tackled Karl Marx's Das Kapital, eventually publishing a long multi-authored volume entitled Lire le capital (1968), partially translated as Reading Capital (1970). In the ensuing years, as the group disintegrated over personal, political, and theoretical differences, the contributions by Macherey and Rancière were deleted. In 1966, Macherey published Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, translated as A Theory of Literary Production (1978), which for many readers is not only his most important work, but also the most enduring example—at least in literary studies—of an Althusserian approach to textual analysis. In subsequent work, Macherey focused on Spinoza, completing a five-volume interpretation of his Ethics in 1998.

merleau-ponty, maurice

French philosopher. A key proponent of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty is one of the most important commentators on the work of Edmund Husserl. He was also one of the first to recognize the significance of the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is considered by many to have provided the link from phenomenology to structuralism. Undoubtedly, though, Merleau-Ponty is most widely known as a philosopher of the body. Born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, he grew up in the Charente-Maritime region, but studied in Paris, first at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly and then, following a familiar pathway, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), where his classmates included Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. He completed his studies at the ENS in 1930 and then along with Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Strauss began his teacher training at his alma mater the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. He was invited back to the ENS in 1935 to take up a position as tutor and remained there until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. During these years he developed his ideas on perception in preparation for his Doctorat ès Lettres. He also attended the lectures of Alexandre Kojève. During the war, Merleau-Ponty served briefly in the infantry and then following France's surrender he took an active role in the Resistance. After the war, Merleau-Ponty's career really took off. Having already submitted his minor thesis, La structure du comportement (the structure of behaviour), in 1938 (it was published in 1942), he was finally able to submit his major thesis, Phénoménologie de la perception (1945), translated as Phenomenology of Perception (1962). On the strength of this he was offered a Chair in Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the Sorbonne. Part of his research for this project was done at the Husserl archive in Belgium—he was the first French scholar to visit, he was also instrumental in establishing a Paris-based Husserl archive as well. In 1946, together with Sartre and Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty founded the journal, Les Temps Modernes, serving as its political affairs editor until 1952, when he resigned over disagreements with the editorial board concerning their support for North Korea's invasion of South Korea. In the same year he was elevated to a Chair in Philosophy at the Collège de France, the youngest ever appointment. Merleau-Ponty's lifelong project was to explain the lived world. He rejected purely scientific explanations as overly simplified, pointing out that in their attempt to present realist explanations they rely on idealist models. Merleau-Ponty rejected virtually all dualisms, particularly those which separated the mind into parts such as Sigmund Freud's distinction between conscious and unconscious and those which separated subjects from objects. Merleau-Ponty thought rather in terms of continuums of existence, hence his concepts of flesh (chair) and chiasm, which try to explain the interlocking of the differentiated but not isolated components of existence. In this latter respect he was clearly influenced by Henri Bergson. Merleau-Ponty died suddenly and unexpectedly and left behind a large corpus of unfinished material. Thanks to the efforts of diligent editors, two unfinished books, Le Visible et l'invisible (1964), translated as The Visible and the Invisible (1968) and La Prose du Monde (1969), translated as The Prose of the World (1973), have since been published, as have a selection of his lectures from the Collège de France.

matheme

French psychoanalystJacques Lacan's term for his equations, graphs, schemata, and symbols which function like axioms in his thinking and teaching. One finds similar notations in the work of Alain Badiou, who similarly treats mathematical equations as an ontology. In both cases, the matheme is used in preference to language, which is by implication deemed too imprecise to express a particular problem or concept.

Marx, Karl

German Jewish economist and social theorist and one of the most influential thinkers of all time. Born in the Rhineland town of Trier, shortly after it passed from French rule to Prussian rule. As the Prussian state was much less tolerant of Jews than the French, Marx's father converted to Christianity in order to continue to be able to work as a lawyer. His father he wished that his son would follow him into the law, but it was not to be. Although he studied law at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, Marx never became a lawyer. His father transferred him to Berlin in the hope of improving his attitude to study, but if in Bonn he was distracted by duelling and gambling, in Berlin he was distracted by ideas, particularly the work of Hegel, and of the two distractions it was the latter that proved the most enduring in its effects. An academic job was Marx's initial career goal, and he obtained a PhD from the University of Jena, but the political situation in Prussia at that time made it impossible so he instead turned to journalism and took a job with the Cologne‐based liberal newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, becoming its editor at age 24. It was in the offices of Rheinische Zeitung that he met his future collaborator Friedrich Engels in 1842. Marx used his position to publicly critique the monarchical state, which retaliated by censoring his editorials and effectively forcing the paper to close. Marx's so-called 'early writings', On the Jewish Question (1843), A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' (1843-4), and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), among other works, date from this period. Following the closure of Rheinische Zeitung, Marx moved to Paris in 1843, hoping to find there greater freedom to write and think. Abandoning the idea of a professional career, Marx dedicated himself to developing a 'science' of the capitalist economy, living off loans, gifts from benefactors, inheritances, and his meagre royalties. It was a hand-to-mouth existence about which he would later say that he only regretted that his wife and family had to endure it. Marx and Engels published their first collaborative work, The Holy Family, in 1845. Although it was written almost in its entirety by Marx, it was published under a joint name, most likely because at that time Engels was better known. A response to the criticism this book received was written, but never published in Marx's lifetime. The manuscript was preserved however and published as The German Ideology. Expelled from France, Marx moved to Brussels, and began to think in more international terms. His writing no longer focused exclusively on German authors, as it had done in his previous work which contains attacks on Feuerbach, Hegel, and Stirner among others. He now attacked internationally renowned writers such as Proudhon, a radical thinker and rival. In Brussels Marx was involved with the international movement, the Communist League. The League held two conferences in London in 1847, following which Marx and Engels were assigned the task of preparing a manifesto to guide the nascent movement. Engels wrote the initial drafts, and Marx wrote up the final manuscript, which was published in German in London in 1848. A French translation soon followed, as did an English translation in 1850. Yet despite the fact that 1848 was a turbulent year in Europe (the insurrection in Paris, which affected both Baudelaire and Flaubert so deeply, being the most prominent), Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, translated as The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1850) had little immediate impact on revolutionary thought or practice. Provocatively Marx urged the working class to fight alongside the bourgeoisie, insofar as the latter fought against the static conservatism of the feudalist property holders and the monarchy; but he also predicted that the working class would eventually have to overthrow the bourgeoisie as well. Interestingly, the revolutionary programme The Communist Manifesto espoused was primarily democratic in character. Owing to the failure of the liberal revolutions in Europe in 1848 and 1849, both Marx and Engels were forced to flee to England, where they remained until their deaths. Engels found employment in the family firm, overseeing its interests in textile manufacturing and marketing in Manchester. Supported by Engels, Marx settled in London, near to the vast resources of the library in the British Museum, which opened in 1857 and contained over 40 kilometres of shelving (the library itself has since been moved to St Pancras, but Marx's favourite desk is preserved in the now mummified 'reading room'). Marx also wrote hundreds of short articles for various English and German newspapers on diverse topics of contemporary and historical interest, including Britain's imperial occupation of India. His notebooks from the winter of 1857-8, largely compiled whilst seated in the British Museum, were published posthumously as the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf) (1939), translated as Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (1973). Here one sees Marx throw off the influence of Hegel once and for all and begin the process that would lead to the writing of his master work Das Kapital: Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Capital: Critique of Political Economy). Throughout the 1860s Marx worked on, but never completed, and only sporadically published what would come to be known simply as Das Kapital. The first volume appeared in 1867, and was the only volume to appear in Marx's lifetime; the other two volumes were published posthumously under Engels's editorship (a fourth volume was written, but it was published by Karl Kautsky under the separate title of Theories of Surplus Value) in 1884 and 1894 respectively. From the Grundrisse onwards Marx's work became increasingly minutely focused on the precise economic mechanisms of the capitalist system. He admired the productive capacity of capitalism and the way it unleashed tremendous productive forces, but also saw that the system was innately unequal in its distribution of prosperity and ultimately exploitative. More importantly, perhaps, Marx also saw that the logic of capitalist production was such that it was bound to swing from one crisis to another because its very premise, namely the endless pursuit of profit, was destabilizing. Marx's health deteriorated throughout the 1870s, slowing down his rate of work, which had always been prodigious and painstaking, preventing him from finishing his project. Fortunately Engels was able to oversee his legacy. Marx's influence on critical theory is immense, albeit uneven. Indeed, his legacy can be seen in the very constitution of critical theory, particularly in its earliest formulation by the Frankfurt School, in the attention it gives to the real world considerations of economics and politics. His work has also had a significant influence on literary criticism, via the work of artists like Bertolt Brecht and scholars such as Georg Lukács, Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and others, and history, through the work of Perry Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, among many others. Philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, all claim as an essential resource Marx's contribution to political thought. Like any great thinker, Marx has given rise to rival schools of thought, some of which—like Althusser's followers—became highly influential in their own right, as well as powerful opponents. Outside academia, Marx's work has proven to be a powerful intellectual and ideological weapon in the hands of the oppressed everywhere.

Marcuse, Herbert

German cultural critic and one of the most influential members of the Frankfurt School. Late in life, he became an intellectual superstar and a celebrity figure, particularly among dissident students, with the publication of One Dimensional Man (1964), which spoke to the baby-boomer generation of their velvet-lined repression under capitalism and sold over a million copies. Marcuse was born in Berlin into a family of assimilated, upper middle-class Jews. He was in the army during the First World War, but did not see active service. Following the war, he got involved with the Soldier's Council but soon left it. Disillusioned with politics, he decided to focus on his studies. He completed a doctorate on the Künstlerroman (novels about artists) in German literature at Freiburg University. He worked in bookselling and publishing for the next six years. Then, after reading Sein und Zeit (1927), translated as Being and Time (1962), he decided to complete his habilitation under the supervision of its author Martin Heidegger. Owing to their political differences, however, this didn't work out quite as planned. Marcuse completed the thesis, which was published as Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit (Hegel's Ontology and the Foundations of a Theory of Historicity, 1932), but it didn't result in him being confirmed as a professor. Jobless and uncertain of his academic future, Marcuse was recommended to Max Horkheimer, director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), by Edmund Husserl, via a number of intermediaries, and duly given a job, initially as a librarian. It was at this time that Marcuse first read Marx, finding there (especially in the so-called 'early Marx' of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) a materialist ontology that in his view surpassed not only Heidegger, but also Hegel and Dilthey. Marcuse rejected Heidegger's view and developed a philosophy of the present as an inhuman form of existence that could only be rectified by means of a revolution. The rise to power of the Nazis in 1933 necessitated leaving the country. Marcuse followed the Institute first to Switzerland and then to the USA, where he took up permanent residence. During the war, Marcuse was forced to find employment outside of the Institute because of its financial difficulties, so he was unable to publish a great deal between 1942 and 1950. He did, however, manage to publish Reason and Revolution (1941), which attempted to reclaim Hegel's philosophy for the left. His next book, published a decade after the war, Eros and Civilization (1955), is probably his most important book. It brought about the fusion of Marx and Freud that critical theory had been attempting to produce since the 1930s and in doing so launched the analytic approach known as Freudo-Marxism, which even today, continues to influence research in the humanities and social sciences. Contrary to his Frankfurt School colleague, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, Eros and Civilization argues that civilization does not depend upon the renunciation of instinct and indeed could be said to be fuelled by the instincts. Marcuse positions Eros as a unifying power that can be pitted against the fragmenting power of modernity. His next books, Soviet Marxism (1958) and One Dimensional Man (1964) focused more closely on the question of repression. This research can be read as an extension of Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of the culture industry. In 1965, in a high-profile essay published as part of book co-written with Robert Wolff and Barrington Moore, Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marcuse coined the famous concept of repressive tolerance, by which he meant that the fact that a particular state allows certain practices should not deceive us into thinking genuine freedom prevails and by the same token nor should we tolerate the repressive elements of the state. He dedicated the essay to his students at Brandeis University in a gesture of solidarity. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Marcuse was very active in speaking for and to the student protest movement both in the US and in Europe. Marcuse died of a stroke, during a visit to Berlin to speak at the Max Planck Institute at the invitation of Jürgen Habermas.

manifest and latent content

In Die Traumdeutung (1900), translated as The Interpretation of Dreams (1953), Sigmund Freud calls the dream that the analysand or patient recalls the manifest content because this is how the dream appears to them; but, he argues, that appearance conceals a deeper truth, which he calls the latent content, and designates as the dream's thought. It is latent in the sense that it is implicit in the manifest content, but because of the transformations and distortions enacted by the dreamwork it is for all intents and purposes invisible. It is the latent content that his analysis seeks to reveal.

multitude

In Empire (2000) and (more explicitly) in Multitude (2004), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri adapt the Spinozian term to conceive of a new form of political subjectivity. Consisting of singularities rather than individuals, that is to say social subjects who cannot be reduced to their bare life, the multitude is, according to Hardt and Negri, the only form of political subjectivity capable of realizing democracy for what it truly is, namely the rule of everyone by everyone. It is an immanent rather than transcendent concept, so it should not be confused with the idea of a people—it is not unified, but multiple and plural; by the same token, it is not anarchic or incoherent, but joined up by power of what its constituents have in common. Hardt and Negri emphasize the changing composition of labour, particularly the increase in what they refer to as immaterial labour, in support of this point. In the era of the multitude, they argue, race and gender (among many other possible identity differences) will still be important, but they will no longer determine hierarchies of power, or, what amounts to the same thing, regimes of inclusion and exclusion. Hardt and Negri claim, somewhat problematically (as many commentators have remarked), that the multitude is constantly being brought into being by the changes to the composition of capital and society that capitalism itself is unwittingly bringing about.

metalanguage

Language about language. In this sense, virtually all of linguistics and all of literary criticism falls into the category of metalanguage inasmuch as both disciplines are essentially concerned with using language to write about and understand language use. Understood in this rather straightforward fashion the concept poses no real difficulties, but if one takes it literally, then as critics like Jacques Derrida show, you have a real problem because how can language be outside of itself? It is in effect a logical fallacy to suggest it.

metanarrative

See grand narrative.

messianism

The belief that a divine saviour will return to earth and 'save' the true believers. This concept was brought into prominence in critical theory by the work of German philosopher Walter Benjamin. In his late essay, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (included in the collection of his essays selected by Hannah Arendt, Illuminations (1968), Benjamin compares the moment of revolutionary rupture to that of the arrival of the messiah. Messianism has since become a codeword in political philosophy for the belief that history is not a continuum that progresses inexorably from one moment to the next, but is instead a series of punctuations. Jacques Derrida's work on Benjamin focuses almost exclusively on this aspect of his work.

metahistory

The consideration of what history is in a philosophical sense. The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye was the first person to use this term, but it is American historian Hayden White who has given the term its most complete meaning. For Frye it meant simply the speculative philosophy of history, while for White it is the examination both of what history is and how that has changed over time. White is particularly interested in the problematic posed by the fact that history is a form of narrative, a feature it shares with fiction, and as he shows in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century Europe (1973), this has a significant influence on the range of meanings that can be given to a set of basic facts. Was the French Revolution inevitable? If so, why didn't similar revolutions occur elsewhere? Was it a tragedy? If so, from whose perspective? Fredric Jameson's concept of metacommentary takes a similar approach to the analysis of critical theories.

modernity

The cultural and social world produced by and in reaction to the processes of modernization, namely the advent of new ways of thinking (e.g. secularization) and the emergence of new technology (e.g. the steam engine). Modernity is used in two main ways in history and sociology: first, it can refer to any period of radical change, and in this sense there have been several periods of so-called modernity dating back to ancient times; second, it can refer to a very specific moment in history—but there is no general rule or agreement as to when this moment should be (other than that it should be one of the moments referred to in the first sense of the word). As Fredric Jameson records in A Singular Modernity (2002), the word 'modern' has been in use since the 5th century ad and by his reckoning has been used to refer to at least 14 periods in history since then. Modernity in this first sense might be thought of as qualitative in that it refers only to a change in attitude; in contrast, then, we might thus specify that modernity in the second sense is quantitative in that it refers to a change in the very composition of society, not just in its attitudes. But there would still be the problem of which period counts as genuinely modern in this expanded sense and historians are divided in this regard between two principal moments in European history; the end of the 'dark ages' and the start of the industrial revolution. The choice itself depends on whether attitudes or technology is foregrounded (arguably, too, the change in attitudes was a necessary precursor to the invention of new technology). Generally, though, most uses of the term modernity tend to refer to the period also known as the Victorian era, particularly the latter half, i.e. from the 1870s onwards. As Jameson also points out, modernity is also the back-projection of postmodernism—it is the mythical moment when 'now' began. See also alternate modernity.

masculinity

The culturally relative ideal gender identity for men. Studies of masculinity, a now quite considerable body of work, show that the specific nature of masculinity varies across time and geography—men in 19th-century Britain were expected to act and behave quite differently from the way they are expected to act and behave today; similarly in the 21st-century men in Britain are expected to act and behave quite differently from men in Iraq. Thus, it is more usual in critical discourse to speak of masculinity in the plural rather than the singular. The study of masculinity is an offshoot of the study of gender pioneered in feminism and Cultural Studies, and as such its research has at its core the problem of identity formation. In particular it has overturned the idea of biological determinism which holds that gendered behaviour is a function of physiology—e.g. men are stronger and more aggressive than women and are therefore naturally supposed to be hunter-warriors—and shown very clearly that masculinity is culturally defined. Research in the field has been greatly influenced by Judith Butler's concept of performativity (which she derives from J. L. Austin's linguistic concept of the performative), which claims that all gender roles are performances requiring constant self-management. Along the same lines, some researchers have wanted to argue that men are under just as much stress to conform to cultural expectations of the ideal body as women, though many in feminism see this as overstating things since in most parts of the world the patriarchy is still firmly in place.

mimesis

The imitation of nature. Both Plato and Aristotle wrote extensively about mimesis, both were worried about its capacity to present the truth in contrast to the more reliable form of philosophy. In classical literature, mimesis is the opposite of diegesis in that it refers to the attempt by an author to speak in a voice other than their own, specifically a character's. In more recent critical discourse mimesis has become a code phrase for realism, or more precisely works of art that attempt to present reality in its most everyday and mundane sense. The famous debate in the 1930s between Bertolt Brecht and György Lukács, two of the 20th-century's most important Marxist critics, centred on the relative artistic value of mimesis, with Lukács arguing in favour of it, saying it was necessary to get away from the tales of aristocracy if the truth of society was to be told, and Brecht arguing against it by saying that the imitation of reality dulled the audience's mind and instead what they needed was to be shocked (the so-called estrangement-effect). In the immediate aftermath of World War II, and perhaps in response to the shock of the war itself, mimesis was foregrounded as the pinnacle of artistic achievement, especially in literature, by Eric Auerbach's magisterial book Mimesis (1953), which showed that the goal of art since the earliest times had been to represent nature just as it is. In critical theory, mimesis has been important to a range of scholars, but most notably French psychoanalystJacques Lacan, and after him (adapting his ideas), the postcolonial critics Homi Bhabha and Michael Taussig, who see in it the origins for a theory of resistance. Bhabha, in particular, plays on the idea that the subaltern, by imitating the hegemonic other, i.e. the colonial master, escapes scrutiny and thereby creates the conditions necessary for political subversion. By the same token, inasmuch as the subaltern looks like their master in manner and dress, they compel the master to recognize that the Other looks like them.

Marxism

The political discourse and a revolutionary social movement inspired by the work of Karl Marx. At its most elementary, Marxism is a science of history premised on the view that the economy, or more precisely the mode of production, determines and decides the conditions of existence for all people. There is a utopian dimension to it as well inasmuch as its basic conviction is that the needs of all people should be met by society. In the capitalist mode of production, however, this is impossible because there is a divide between the owners of the means of production and the workers who must sell their labour to survive—the relationship between the two, which Marx refers to as a class struggle, is fundamentally iniquitous in Marx's view. Marx theorized that once workers became aware of this inequality and the fact that it could not be overcome without making changes to the very mode of production that they would rise up in protest and overturn capitalism and replace it with socialism. History proved him wrong on this last count. The history of Marxism as a revolutionary social movement begins with the founding of the First International in 1864 and to a certain degree ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In between, of course, there were three more Internationals as well as highly successful revolutions in Russia, China, Korea, and Cuba. As a form of political discourse, Marxism has had a varied history—it experienced a major rupture following the Russian Revolution in 1917. Marxist scholars in the western parts of Europe felt cut off from the events in Russia, but also felt defeated by the failure of revolution to occur in their own country. A new form of Marxism, generally known as Western Marxism, emerged at this point and to a certain degree developed independently of the more pragmatic version of Marxism that obtained in the USSR. See also critical theory.

mirror stage

The stage of childhood development in which the ego is formed according to Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis. His theory is based on the so-called 'mirror test' conducted by his friend, the psychologist Henri Wallon, who compared the reactions to a mirror of 6-month-old human babies with similar aged chimpanzees. What was noteworthy about the experiment to Wallon, and hence Lacan, was the fact that the chimpanzees showed only limited interest in their reflection, whereas the human babies were utterly fascinated. Lacan concluded from this that the human babies had misrecognized the image in the mirror as their actual selves. For the first time in their lives, the babies obtained an image of themselves as a whole (thus creating in them the narcissistic sense that before that moment their body was fragmented); by the same token, the babies see that their body is distinct from both their environment and the body of others. In this way, too, the subject is alienated from itself. It introduces the subject into the imaginary order.

myth criticism

The study of both myths as literature and literature as myths—in the former case, myths are read for their own specific literary merit and as historical precursors to later literary texts (Sophocles' trilogy of plays surrounding the myth of Oedipus would be one example); in the latter case, which has been the more influential of the two approaches, literary texts are read as creative reworkings of myths. A number of prominent scholars have operated in this field: the most notable are Mircea Eliade, Leslie Fiedler, Northrop Frye, René Girard, Carl Jung, G. Wilson Knight, and Paul Ricoeur.

metaphysics

The study of that which lies outside of or beyond the physical realm; (i.e. outside of the realm of the measurable and indeed the knowable). It aims to know and describe the world in its totality, including everything that is not immediately available to the naked eye. It is in this sense inevitably speculative since it deals with such unknowns and perhaps unknowables as causality, existence, and possibility. As such, both empirical philosophers like David Hume and critical philosophers like Immanuel Kant have been severe on metaphysics. The term derives from Aristotle and refers to works he wrote after his essays on physics. Aristotle himself did not use the word metaphysics—the subject matter he considered, which has since been labelled metaphysics, he referred to as 'first philosophy'. Jacques Derrida defines deconstruction as a critique of western metaphysics, which seems to mean the whole of western philosophy. In contrast, Gilles Deleuze's work might be thought of as a lifelong attempt to discern the physical underpinnings of metaphysics.

modernization

The transformation of culture and society brought about by embracing a combination of new ways of thinking and new technology. A highly problematic concept in sociology and development studies, modernization theory assumes that all societies are on an evolutionary trajectory taking them from 'primitive' to 'modern' and that if they are not yet modern it is because they are reactionary and/or underdeveloped. This is problematic because it assumes that the western standard of living and lifestyle is the norm to which all societies should aspire; it also assumes that the western standard of living and lifestyle is implicitly the best available (in spite of the contrary evidence from environmental science). Modernism is often thought of as a reaction to modernization, a means by which a particular society can absorb the shocks that rapid and radical change can cause. Modernization is also of interest to the Annales School of historians—their research asks why modernization occurred in one place and not another.

masquerade

Used in psychoanalysis to designate a psychological phenomenon of adopting an expected social role or persona and maintaining appearances. It was first used by British psychoanalyst Joan Rivière in a paper entitled 'Womanliness as Masquerade' (1929). Although the term is frequently used by feminist cultural critics like Germaine Greer, it has not really been developed into a fully fledged concept. It can, in this sense, be seen as a precursor to the much more sophisticated concept of performativity developed by Judith Butler.