“Concerned with the status of the ‘Real,’ these films are necessarily both self-reflexive and projective, folding the transcendental loop back on itself – from a dialectics of the ‘fable’ to the entropic spiral of the ‘image'”.
Category: theory
[Essay] Elizabethan Travel Writing and The Merchant of Venice — Josh Mcloughlin
“In the same way Edward Said describes orientalism as regulating otherness by ‘making statements about it, authorizing views about it, describing it,’ Shakespeare and Coryat fix Jewish visual and linguistic difference, the one theatrically, the other through ‘observation’”.
[Essay] Marooned Between Dreams and Reality: Surrealist Satire on Film — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“Surrealism’s preoccupation with the subconscious, and the gulf between dreams and reality, is writ large in Barton Fink’s implied insomnia.”
[Essay] Power, Possession and Monstrous Femininity — Victoria Griffin
“While the narrative ostensibly turns on a tale of demons, it symbolically reveals a social commentary on the state of female empowerment.”
[Essay] Floyd Mayweather: The Willing ‘Bastard’ of Boxing — Michael McGinley-Hughes
“His unmarked face, a benefit of his unparalleled defence, became the symbol of the audience’s disdain.”
[Essay] Pornoentropia — Louis Armand
“The nakedness of the image is always an interstice – something into which the visualization of desire is constantly projected in a type of pornographic monomania.”
[Essay] The Mythology of Starbucks — Maddy Howard
“Just as Barthes says the texture of steak, its sanguine juiciness, seem to be magically health-giving, the foamy, insubstantial milkiness of a cappuccino or latte has its own special sublimity.”
[Essay] On #YOLO — Charles Bliss
“In the face of the void of oblivion after death, YOLO is an exhortation to action-experience, a mindfulness of our own mortality.”
[Essay] Nationalism and the National Poet: Shakespeare, Lacan, and the Aphanisis of England — Josh Mcloughlin
“The history plays demonstrate Lacanian aphanisis on a national scale, disclosing the fundamental instability of all nationalisms and exposing the aporia at the heart of Englishness.”
[Essay] Why Marxism and Critical Theory Still Matter — Dan Formby
“It in oppositional reading practices—feminist, post-structuralist, post-colonialist, cultural materialist, affect theory, cybernetics, ecocriticism—that the legacy and future of critical theory lie.”
[Essay] Sound and the City: Sonic Technologies and Urban Subjectivity – Jamie Bulman
“These personal moments give new meanings to the music we listen to, re-contextualising them within our personalised canon of musical experience.”
[Essay] Dérive: Situationist Architecture and the Modern City — Matilda Roberts
“For Raoul Vaneigem, creativity, love and play are life’s nutrients – the only real ways in which we can participate in the world.”
[Essay] F.M. Mayor and Literary Modernism — Robert Firth
“The subtly crafted modernisms of isolation, doubt and disillusionment are rendered through both character and narrative form by situating both at a subjective and historical fault line marking the border between discontinuity and classic realist denouement.”
[Essay] Shakespeare on Screen: Adaptation and the Politics of Fidelity — Josh Mcloughlin
“Loncraine’s Richard III resists a critical approach that measures the ‘textual fidelity’ of an adaptation against its literary or historical proximity to Shakespeare’s original.”
[Essay] Art and Ideology: Clark, Courbet, and Althusser — Josh Mcloughlin
“Courbet makes visible (donner à voir) the interpellation of rural subjectivity not only in the gaze of urban bourgeois ideology but in the equally culpable stare of genre painting itself.”
