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John Frow

Coming in at 3,140 pages spread over four chunky volumes and featuring essays by 181 contributors, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory is in every sense a weighty articulation of the state of literary criticism in the early twenty-first century. In their famous Encyclopédie (1751–66), Diderot and d’Alembert promulgated the virtues of consolidating new know-ledge in the public domain, rather than leaving the intellectuals who were responsible for the development of such expertise isolated in their academic cloisters. Looking back self-consciously to this distinguished predecessor, John Frow, in his Introduction, acknowledges a tension between the encyclopedist’s instinct to reproduce conventional categories, instead of risking the introduction of new research that might upset conceptual applecarts, and the desire of ambitious editors to frame these topics in a progressive rather than ossified manner. Hence Frow cites his instructions to contributors as inviting authors ‘to make their own arguments about the topic rather than (just) describing existing treatments of it’, adding: ‘In this way many of our articles may diverge from what readers would expect to see out of a traditional encyclopedia entry.’

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As John Frow and Katrina Schlunke state in their editorial, the diverse writing in this issue of Cultural Studies Review, collected under the theme of ‘Homefronts’, includes essays dealing with nationhood, family, the manufacture of crisis and celebrity, neo-liberalism and homelessness. Given the space to explore complexity, many contributions remain refreshingly accessible to the non-specialist reader. Popular culture is, of course, one of the mainstays of cultural studies, and the first two essays concern themselves with film. Jon Stratton’s insightful opening essay posits that the Australian tilt towards neo-liberalism from the mid 1990s, with its replacement of the social contract with individualism, has led to a series of films in which individual contracts and narratives of revenge are legitimised. Concerns with this ideological shift pervade a number of the essays, including pointed analyses of TV networks mining tragedy and triumph in Beaconsfield (by Jason Bainbridge) and the Howard government’s constructions of ‘crisis’ in indigenous communities (Virginia Watson).

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Adorno by Lorenz Jaeger (translated by Stewart Spencer) & The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory edited by Fred Rush

by
June–July 2005, no. 272

In the winter of 1968–69 the buildings of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt – the symbolically resonant home of what had come to be known as the Frankfurt School – were occupied by students. The police were called in, and Theodor W. Adorno, one of the great radical theorists of the twentieth century, pressed charges against a young man whose doctoral work he was supervising. Two months later, a group of women forced their way into Adorno’s lecture, handed out leaflets proclaiming that ‘Adorno as an institution is dead’, and ‘surrounded him, strewing flowers, performing a dumb show and … baring their breasts’. In action after action, the contempt of the students for the radical theorists of an older generation was made clear.

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