by Jeanne Willette | Mar 7, 2014 | Postmodern
POSTMODERNISM AND HETEROGLOSSIA PART TWO Hybridity and Pluralism In her 1966 essay, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” Julia Kristeva (1941-) privileged the term “Text,” insisting that the subject is composed of discourses, created by a signifying system. The...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 28, 2014 | Postmodern
THEORIES OF THE POSTMODERN PART ONE Texts and Textuality The phenomenon that would be known by the 1980s as Postmodern theory or “theory” consisted of servings of a French Potée from the 1950s and 1960s, full of different ingredients, a stew of linguistic...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 21, 2014 | Philosophy
THEORIES OF THE POSTMODERN From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss to Lacan, the Signifier Floated The search for origins are always futile but the process often turns up interesting moments in time. For example, when did Postmodernism begin? The answer depends upon the place one...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 14, 2014 | Postmodern
THEORIES OF POSTMODERNISM Feminism, Post-Colonialism, and the Loss of Mastery Over the World Picture In 1986 Postmodern painter Mark Tansey (1949-) produced a large orangish monochrome painting of a long white fallen column. Broken in three places and lying next to a...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 7, 2014 | Postmodern
THEORIES OF THE POSTMODERN INTERTEXTUALITY Bakhtin and Kristeva Working within the confines of the Soviet Union, a place where words, thoughts and deeds were monitored, the literary theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) examined, in an intellectually safe...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 31, 2014 | Theory
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926 – 1986) PART FIVE Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (1975) The opening pages of Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault were one of the best representations of his long term project of making history or the past...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 24, 2014 | Theory
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926 – 1984) PART FOUR What is an Author? (1969) To read Michel Foucault, is to feel the grounds of one’s belief systems shift underneath one’s feet. For Foucault, as for Roland Barthes (1916-1980), the notion of the author must come into...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 17, 2014 | Theory
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926 – 1984) PART THREE This is not a Pipe (1968) Michel Foucault’s essay, This is not a Pipe, his contemplation on a famous painting by René Magritte, La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) (1929) can be read as a...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 10, 2014 | Theory
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926 – 1984) PART TWO The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) Like many French intellectuals, Michel Foucault witnessed the now-legendary days of May, 1968 in which the students and later the proletariat or working class rose up against the forces...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 3, 2014 | Theory
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926 – 1984) PART ONE The Order of Things. The Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) For English speaking readers lacking the intellectual and cultural background to understand the transformation of French philosophy after the Second World...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 27, 2013 | Theory
ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1980) PART SIX Camera Lucida (1980) When he wrote Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes had little time left to him. It is one of the ironies of his ironic life that his last book–an extended act of mourning–would be his last before his...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 20, 2013 | Theory
ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1980) PART FIVE The Pleasure of the Text (1973) In his 1997 history of Structuralism, History of Structuralism: Volume One: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966, François Dosse described Roland Barthes in a number of ways–“the Mother Figure of...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 13, 2013 | Theory
ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1980) PART FOUR “The Death of the Author” (1968) “The Death of the Author,” written in 1967 and published in 1968, is a stance against the enclosure of Structuralism and the authority of formalism. While the essay by Roland...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 6, 2013 | Theory
ROLAND BARTHES PART THREE Towards Structuralism The goal of all structuralist activity, whether reflexive or poetic, is to reconstruct an object so as to manifest the rules of its functioning. In 1980, Edith Kurzweil published a still-indespensible book, The Age of...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 29, 2013 | Theory
ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1980) PART TWO Mythologies (1957) In the fifties, Roland Barthes was a semiologist, following Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), in using the sign, the signifier and the signified to study the social condition....
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 22, 2013 | Theory
ROLAND BARTHES (1914 – 1980) PART ONE Writing Degree Zero (1953) One of the most interesting facts of the life of Roland Barthes was that he was struck by a laundry van and, after lingering for a month, died of his injuries. “The Painter of Modern...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 15, 2013 | Theory
HAROLD BLOOM AND THE MODERNIST TRADITION Literary Criticism and Close Reading Although Harold Bloom (1930-), from the perspective of the 21st century seems like a historical figure, he was a liminal figure caught between Modernism and Postmodernism. It is one of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 8, 2013 | Theory
HAROLD BLOOM (1930 -) The Canon The most prolific upholder of the Modern “canon” is Harold Bloom, the quintessential Modernist holdout surrounded by a sea of Postmodern theorists. However, Bloom, always an interesting and prolific writer, is merely more frank than...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 1, 2013 | Postmodern
COMPARING MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM The comparison of these two time periods was an inevitable result of the desire of Postmodern theorists to critique Modernist theory. But comparison was an early impulse trapped in the very polarities of Modernism that...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 25, 2013 | Postmodern
POSTMODERNISM Coining the Term “Postmodernism” was a term coined by Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) early in the century to refer to the last quarter of the 19th century, a time where capitalism and imperialism and Western civilization in general began to...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 18, 2013 | Postmodern
POSTMODERN THEORY Introduction: Modernism and Post-Modernism Deeply marked by the idealism of the Second World War, Americans woke slowly to the changed landscape where idealism was impossible. The era of endless fear and war without end had dawned. The only way it...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 11, 2013 | Philosophy
JULIA KRISTEVA (1941-) Abjection Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980/1982) was a turning point in her career and in postmodern theory because she re-located the origin of psychoanalysis in the notion of abjection. Following in the footsteps of Luce Irigaray, this...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 4, 2013 | Philosophy
JULIA KRISTEVA (1941 – ) Transgression and the Feminine The philosophy and theories generated by Julia Kristeva bear traces of her own personal marginality: a woman in a man’s world, an east European from Bulgaria in the heart of Parisian intellectual...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 27, 2013 | Postmodern
MAYA LIN (1959-) PART TWO: THE VIET NAM MEMORIAL The Reception of the Wall “Diane Carlson Evans, who served as a nurse, described the grotesque reception that she received upon returning home: “The attitude of the public was beyond belief. The protesters,...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 20, 2013 | Postmodern
MAYA LIN (1959-) PART ONE: THE VIET NAM MEMORIAL The Historical Context Any artist of color, any artist who is a woman or who is gay must overcome unspoken but powerful barriers to their entry into the art world. Call it the glass ceiling, call it discrimination,...
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