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| Many modern thinkers and artists have claimed that a sense of alienation from other human beings is the natural human condition. Marx, on the other hand, argued that individuals were alienated from each other by the dehumanizing processes of industrial labour. |
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| Michel Foucault's term for his historical researches into the hidden discourses of Western society (such as its suppressed history of homosexuality). The aim of these archaeologies was to show that Western culture was based on power relations rather than such idealistic notions as truth or natural justice. |
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| According to Walter Benjamin, the unique quality which differentiates a work of art from its reproduction. A critical factor in the development of this aura is the cultural history of the artefact itself—its sense of belonging to a certain tradition. |
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| In classical Marxist theory, society is made up of an economic base or infrastructure and a superstructure which comprises all other human social and cultural activities. The base is held to dictate the form that those various activities—religion, the law, politics, education, the media, the arts, etc.—will take. |
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| The term used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to describe the complex of forces in our society which strive to repress the expression of individual desire. Capital, for example, is treated as the body-without-organs of the capitalist. |
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| Mikhail Bakhtin saw the institution of carnival as a model for subversion of socio-political authority in the way that it parodied the ruling class. The comic genius Rabelais was for Bakhtin an excellent example of the application of the carnival spirit to literary narrative. |
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| Chaos theory emphasizes how sensitive systems are to changes in their initial conditions, and how unpredictable this makes their behaviour. One of the most disturbing aspects of the theory is that it allows for the simultaneous presence of randomness and determinism within systems. |
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| The sense of belonging to a specific social class, whose common interests create a sense of solidarity in its members. Marxists believe that when the proletariat, for example, reaches an awareness of its exploited status, then there is the basis for a social revolution. |
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| Complexity theory argues that physical systems can evolve to higher levels of development through spontaneous self-organization. This phenomenon can be seen at work in organisms as diverse as human consciousness or the entire universe—possibly even within the more sophisticated computer networks. |
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| Compulsory heterosexuality |
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| The contention that heterosexuality is viewed as the sexual norm in Western societies, with all other sexual practices being treated as deviations. Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and the queer theory movement have argued that this inhibits the full expression of our sexual natures. |
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| Georg Lukacs's term for literary narratives that demonstrate how the economic system forms human character. In the case of capitalism, this is assumed to encourage the development of competitiveness and self-interest. Lukacs did not require the author to condemn this practice, merely make it apparent to the reader. |
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| The combination of human and machine (the term is a contraction of “cybernetic organism”). In the work of Donna Haraway, this notion is celebrated as a way of escaping human, and most particularly gender, limitations. |
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| A concept devised by Roland Barthes to describe the process by which texts take on a life of their own after they leave the author. Henceforth, the become the province of the reader, who is in no way bound by whatever the author's intentions may have been. |
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| In structuralist theory, systems are held to have deep structures which dictate how they operate. Roland Barthes, for example, assumed an underlying structure of rules to narrative. Another way of thinking of deep structure is as something similar to a genetic programme. |
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| The process by which literary language renders the everyday unfamiliar to the reader. By “making strange” the aspects of our world, authors force us to notice what we normally take for granted. The concept was coined by Viktor Shklovsky. |
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| Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari see individual human beings as motivated by the need to find an outlet for their libidinal energy: in their terminology, as “desiring-machines”. Much of modern society, in their view, is dedicated to suppressing this drive. |
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| Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari regard institutional authority as inherently territorial in mentality. Attempts to contest the boundaries that institutions set therefore count as acts of deterritorialization. Nomadic thought (q.v.) is an example of such transgressive behaviour. |
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| In the Hegelian dialectic, thesis generates antithesis, with the conflict between the two resolving itself into the creation of a new thesis or synthesis. Marx took over this scheme, but located it in the material world where it manifested itself in the struggle of one class against another. Resolution would come about in our own era when the proletariat overcame the bourgeoisie. |
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| Mikhail Bakhtin conceived of meaning as in a constant process of negotiation between individuals in a given society; that is, as “dialogic”. Rather than being fixed, meaning is plural and always open to reinterpretation—and the same can be said of any narrative. |
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| The neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to describe the way in which words fail to achieve fixed meaning at any one point. Meaning is always indeterminate to Derrida—both “differed” and “deferred”—and différance is the movement within language that prevents it from being otherwise. |
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| In poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, difference is always emphasized over unity, and is taken to be an inescapable aspect of human affairs. Systems, and texts, are held to be internally marked by difference and incapable of achieving unity: rather, they lend themselves to multiple interpretations. |
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| Jean-Francois Lyotard's term for an irresolvable dispute, in which each side starts from incommensurable premises. An employer and an employee debating employment rights would be one example; colonizer and colonized debating property rights another. Traditionally, what happens is that the stronger side imposes its will on the weaker. |
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| In the work of Michel Foucault, discourse constitutes a social practice governed by an agreed set of conventions. Medicine is a discourse, as is law, or any academic discipline. Discourses are founded on power relations, and function something like paradigms (q.v.) in Thomas Kuhn. |
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| Charles Jencks's term to describe how postmodern architecture ought to work; that is, to appeal to both a specialist and a general audience. Modernist architecture had signally failed to do so, in his opinion, restricting its appeal to special practitioners only. |
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| French Feminists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have argued that women should develop a style of writing uniquely their own, self-consciously distancing themselves from patriarchal modes of expression Other than a certain fluidity of meaning, however, it is difficult to specify what the style actually involves. |
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| The cultural movement, dating from the Enlightenment period in the 18th century, that emphasizes the role of reason in human affairs and is committed to material progress and the liberation of humankind from political servitude. Modern culture is based on these premises. |
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| A theory of drama developed by the playwright Bertolt Brecht which demanded that, rather that providing an illusion of real life, theatre should make its artifice visible by “alienation effect” to the audience. Theatre that did so, Brecht thought, would then become a critique of the dominant values of its society. |
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| In the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, a grand narrative constitutes a universal explanatory theory which admits no substantial opposition to its principles. Marxism is one such example, liberal humanism another, with ideology in general tending to operate in such an authoritarian manner. |
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| According to Elaine Showalter, the proper object of feminist critics in texts that concentrate on female experience, or “gynotexts”. The concern of gynocriticism is to trace the development of a specifically female literary tradition, thus challenging patriarchal accounts of literary history. |
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| In Marxist theory (particularly the work of Anotonio Gramsci), hegemony explains how the ruling class exerts domination over all other classes by a variety of apparent “consensus” means, including the use of the media to transmit its system of values. |
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| Literature by female authors in which the female protagonists are placed in situations which test their characters and require them to display heroic behaviour in order to survive. The term was devised by Ellen Moers, for whom 18th-century Gothic novels were an example of “travelling heroinism”. |
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