ENGL 361: The Politics of Taste Class 8 Practice Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering key concepts from ENGL 361 Spring 2026, Class 8, focusing on interpellation, taste, cultural capital, and ideology.

Interpellation

The ways images cause us to recognize ourselves as subjects of an address within systems of power, which relies on a collective address that feels personal.

Althusser

The theorist who argued that "ideology interpellates individuals as subjects" and defined ideology as "the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence."

Hailed

Part of the process of interpellation where a subject is "called to, called on, or called out" by an image or address.

Field of gaze

The exhibition and viewing context which acts as one of the sources of meaning for an image.

Aesthetics

A branch of philosophy concerned with judgments of beauty.

Taste

The shared artistic and cultural values of a particular social community; "good" taste typically entails cultural education about value.

Connoisseur

Someone with an educated taste who possesses specific cultural knowledge.

Kitsch

Mass-produced objects or images regarded as cheap and garish that often convey prepackaged emotions and avoid political complexities of traumatic events.

Cultural capital

A term proposed by Bourdieu referring to cultural knowledge that allows for certain social advantages and is accumulated and passed down through generations.

Bourdieu

The scholar who argued that capital extends beyond economics to include social, symbolic, and cultural capital, originally suggesting it "trickles down" from upper to lower classes.

False consciousness

For Marx, a belief system that dominant power spreads among the masses to conceal domination and maintain existing power hierarchies within industrial capitalism.

Imaginary

The shaping of beliefs through the unconscious; a component of Althusser's definition of ideology.

Hegemony

A concept from Gramsci where power is negotiated among all classes and dominant ideologies are presented as "common sense," kept in a constant state of flux.

Gramsci

The theorist associated with the concept of hegemony and the negotiation of power among classes.

Counterhegemony

Social forces that work against dominant meaning and power systems.

Cruel optimism

Defined by Berlant as a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered to be impossible, fantasy, or toxic.

Berlant

The scholar whose work focuses on "cruel attachment" to things that actively hurt individuals, such as capitalism.

The good life

A training where people believe they and their actions ought to matter, tied to the American Dream and the belief that life will eventually show loyalty to them.

Deferred enjoyment

The promise that present misery will eventually lead to a future reward, such as a raise, promotion, or retirement, which moves subjects toward the "good life."

Visuality

How systems of power enact and enforce authority practically and symbolically, as seen in the analysis of nineteenth-century prints of forced labor.

Shepard Fairey

The artist responsible for the Obey Giant logo/street art, which serves as a symbol of the circulation of cultural capital.