Fredric Jameson’s controversial essay ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1) sets out his theory of what he calls ‘third-world literature,’ positioning it as a form of national allegory. Since its publication in 1986, this essay has
First published in 1975, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Theory of Minor Literature (1) draws on many of the themes of their earlier works; a critical stance towards psychoanalytical hegemony, an emphasis on the continuities between human
Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle is perhaps his most controversial work. It is difficult to get to grips with ideologically and to follow through the twists and turns of its reasoning. This post offers a simple explanation of Freud’s key ideas.
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is often used as an example of a work astride two movements: modernism and postmodernism. It was written in 1955 when modernism was experiencing something of a revival in the wake of the Second World
In his 1919 essay of the same title, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud defines das unheimliche (‘the uncanny’) as, ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ His original essay relies on the etymology of the
Overview Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish charts the trajectory of penal justice from pre-enlightenment forms of torture and public execution to the birth of the modern prison. This historical/sociological study is not a simplistic narrative of humanity’s progress from barbarism