the language of the academy

afristocrat

Michael Eric Dyson's term for upper class and upper middle class African Americans who have "made it" and judge the ghettocracy (his term) for bringing down the race. Instead of acknowledging or assigning blame to historical (white) agencies and structures, the afristocrat lays blame on poor African Americans.

agency

power; think about who holds power in the text or the ways in which it shifts

afristocrat

Michael Eric Dyson's term for upper class and upper middle class African Americans who have "made it" and judge the ghettocracy (his term) for bringing down the race. Instead of acknowledging or assigning blame to historical (white) agencies and structures, the afristocrat lays blame on poor African Americans.

agency

power; think about who holds power in the text or the ways in which it shifts

alienation of man

Entfremdung (estrangement) is Marx's notion that in a socially stratified society, man becomes alienated from his natural state. There are four modes: alienation from labour, alienation from production, alienation from himself, alienation from other people. It is the engine of capitalism that structures these alienations. In brief, man is alienated from labor and production when he is working for someone else's profit and not for producing a good that can be consumed by all members of a society. The alienation of himself is the experience of a reduced access to one's organic development and instead a mechanistic development outside of one's control. Alienation towards others is generated by the nature of competition that drives everyone in capitalism. Instead of seeing the other person as a human being, you see them as a competitive object.

amplify

When a literary work wants you to pay attention (usually through some technique) to a particular idea or phrase, you can say that the writer is amplifying the message or idea.

banal

the mundane, the everyday or ordinary; what the term banal captures is the persistence of the everyday and how it conditions people to become numb to environmental conditions. "The banal of evil" has been used to suggest that we become desensitized to measures of evil when they persist at a conscious or subconscious level. Evil becomes so commonplace, normalized, and mundane that people don't even notice it.

commodity fetishism

according to Marx, a symptom of capitalism is an obsessive attachment to material objects.

distill

extract the essence of (something) by heating it with a solvent. You can say that you will attempt to distill one element of a literary work amidst the larger complexities that the work offers.

domestic sphere

of or relating to the home; feminist writing has been concerned with the ways in which the domestic sphere is represented (as a lesser space than the outside world); similarly the domestic novel has interests in discussing the home (not an adventure, not the business world). Jonathan Franzen's work has been hailed for its understanding and celebration of the domestic sphere; feminist complain that women always write about the domestic realm and do not achieve critical acclaim, but when a man does it, he is praised. Also, the narrative trend of literature that focuses on the domestic sphere tends to lead women toward an ultimate goal of marriage and, consequently, a life restricted to this sphere through the bearing of children.

foreground

to show what you will emphasize in your analysis. For example, "My discussion will foreground the metaphorical dimensions of the work."

globalization

A term that is charged by various political definitions. The basic way of defining the term is to look at in contrast - isolation v. globalization. Isolation names the economic and cultural philosophy of preserving one's own ideas and economic control within the nation; the state controls everything and does not interact with other nations (North Korea is our best example); the idea of globalization is the exact opposite of isolation - it names an exchange of cultures and economic goods.

hegemony

leadership or dominance, esp. by one country or social group over others: Germany was united under Prussian hegemony aer 1871.

interpretive space

we use this term to refer to how much room a text has for interpretation: some texts use direct language and offer few symbols thereby reducing interpretive space.

interpretation of dreams

Manifest Content - what you "see" in your dreams
Latent Content - what is behind the formation of your dreams
Displacement - unconscious defense mechanism
Condensation - what is repressed in your mind returns

liminal character

A character positioned between two places, cultures, etc.

jettison

abandon or discard (someone or something that is no longer wanted): individuals are oen forced to jettison certain attitudes and behaviors. You can say that you will jettison Marxist readings of a text in order to utilize a more productive psychoanalytic reading.

mimesis

the notion that art is to represent reality, or as Hamlet puts it, "as twere a mirror to nature." Art should be based on reality, not fantasy or melodrama.

(the) nation

Throughout history, the notion of the nation or nationhood was important in terms of identity, land acquisition, boundaries, and social organization. Under globalization, we can ask, "Does the nation still exist?". Some citizens split their lives between two or more countries. What we used to think of, for example, as an absolute Irish identity has undergone critical changes as Ireland has become more multi-cultural. National identity, far from being an absolute truth, is an abstract and mythological notion. National identity is constructed through imagination and it has to be bound up and shared in a form (narration). We, as Americans, will not meet 95% of our fellow Americans, yet we believe that as Americans we share a certain American-ness. We do, though, have certain stories that many, many Americans read - The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, etc. Organizing literature/film by nations today, though, proves problematic. Is it an American text if the writer is from another country, but has spent time living in America? When we watch an American film today, the likelihood that it is fully produced, directed, and set in the United States is slim; more likely it features an international production team, shot in various locations, etc. Do we say that Ezra Pound is English/American because he lived a life divided between both nations? What characteristics make a text American? Furthermore, when we teach a World Film course and organize it by nations, we run into the larger problem of seeing the film as in some ways representative of that nation; we watch a handful of Danish films and believe that we know something about Denmark or Denmark's Cinema. These reductive generalizations generate more misunderstandings than any ultimate educational service.

negotiate

We use this term when we are accessing what a film/novel is doing with an idea. When the novel isn't trying to change an idea, but its also not endorsing the idea, sometimes it is a negotiation. For example, one might argue that The Great Gatsby is negotiating the American brand of capitalism (if you believed that it wasn't pointing the way to socialism or proselytizing capitalism).

paradigm

a typical example or pattern of something; a model: there is a new paradigm for public art in this country. A worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject: the discovery of universal gravitation became the paradigm of successful science.

panopticon

Derived originally from Jeremy Benthem's studies of the prison system. What is observed with a structure that has a central watchtower is that the prisoners who are under the eye of the watchtower change their behavior. The prison does not need as many guards if they have a watchtower with one guard overlooking the prison yard. In fact, one can even remove the guard and the prisoners still behave out of fear. Michel Foucault develops this research to point out that with an all-seeing
structure, prisoners exist in a neurotic, jittery space. Prisoners psychologically internalize the surveillance.

performance of gender/identity

As Judith Butler points out in Bodies that Matter, gender does not exist - it is an act, and as in other social rituals and dramas, the actions of gender requires a performance that is repeated. The repetition of this gender performance makes it legitimate. It is important to differentiate between sex (male/female) and gender (social expectations of male/female). According to Butler's theory, homosexuality and heterosexuality are not fixed categories. A person is merely in a condition of "doing straightness" or "doing queerness." She suggests, "We act as if that being of a man or that being of a women is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start."

script

Akin to performance, one can say that there are only certain scripts that we fashion our life around. For example, Gatsby is operating under the script available for his culture of what it means to be financially successful.

put pressure on

to challenge an idea/text or to more thoroughly examine an idea. For example, "I hope to put pressure on these ideas that inform gender theory to make a new argument."

problematize

to find an issue with something or find a hole in an argument. For example, "I think we can problematize David Harvey's contemplations of Marxism in order to enrich our contemporary understanding." When you say that you are problematizing something, you are trying to look at the problems in an idea or concept in order to see what new routes are available. You may agree with some of the ideas of, say, David Harvey, but want to make trouble for some of his other thinking.

simulations

the active process of replacement of the real (ex: our mythologized notion of Los Angeles; instead of really experiencing LA, we have it defined for us via television and culture writ large).

simulacra

a representational image or presence that deceives; the product of simulation usurping reality; for example, a false icon of God or Disneyland. Simulation refers to a process in motion whereas simulacrum (plural simulacra) refers to a more static image

(at) stake

Literary critics talk about what's "at stake" in a book, meaning what's one of the most pressing issues in the book. It's a simple phrase, but one that is part of the academic lexicon.

subvert

To push down or undermine power or authority