Antony Easthope – författare

Difference, the key term in deconstruction, has broken free of its rigorous philosophical context in the work of Jacques Derrida, and turned into an excuse for doing theory the easy way. Celebrating variety for its own sake, Antony Easthope argues, cultural criticism too readily ignores the role of the text itself in addressing the desire of the reader. With characteristic directness, he takes to task the foremost theorists of the current generation one by one, including Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, Dona Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler. In a final tour de force, he contrasts what he calls the two Jakes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to bring out the way their respective theories need each other. The book is vintage Easthope: wide-ranging, fearless, witty and a radical challenge to complacency wherever it is to be found.

Praise for the first edition“The selection is judicious and valuably supplemented by thorough commentaries that contextualise and clarify the debates and issues and the importance of each excerpt. Though today there may be many readers in and around cultural and media studies, Easthope and McGowan’s remains vital…” Times Higher Educational Supplement

This Reader introduces the key readings in critical and cultural theory. It guides students through the tradition of thought, from Saussure’s early writings on language to contemporary commentary on world events by theorists such as Baudrillard and Žižek. The readings are grouped according to six thematic sections: Semiology; Ideology; Subjectivity; Difference; Gender and Race; and Postmodernism.

The second and expanded edition of this highly successful Reader reflects the growing diversity of the field.

Featuring thirteen new essays, including essays by Homi Bhabha, Simone de Beauvoir, Franz Fanon and Judith Butler With a general introduction as well as useful introductions to each of the thematic sectionsIncluding summaries of each of the extracts – invaluable for students and lecturers. Key reading for areas of study including cultural studies, critical theory, literature, linguistics, English, media studies, communication studies, cultural history, sociology, gender studies, visual arts, film and architecture.

Essays by: Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Homi K. Bhabha, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Simone de Beauvoir, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Frederick Engels, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Colin MacCabe, Pierre Macherey, Karl Marx, Kobena Mercer, Laura Mulvey, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Edward Said, Slavoj Žižek.

Modern Literary study was founded on an opposition between the canon and its other , popular culture. The theory wars of the 1970s and the 1980s and, in particular, the advent of structuralist and post structuralist theory, transformed this relationship. With `the death of literature', the distinction between high and popular culture was no longer tenable, and the field of inquiry shifted from literary into cultural studies. Anthony Easthope argues that this new discipline must find a methodological consensus for its analysis of canonical and popular texts. Through a detailed criticism of competing theories (British cultural studies, New Historicism, cultural materialism) he shows how this new study should - and should not be done. Easthope's exploration of the problems, possibilities and politics of this new discipline includes an original reassessment of the question of literary value. By contrasting Conrad's Heart of Darkness with Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes, Easthope demonstrates how textuality sustains the opposition between high and popular culture darkness.

Modern Literary study was founded on an opposition between the canon and its other , popular culture. The theory wars of the 1970s and the 1980s and, in particular, the advent of structuralist and post structuralist theory, transformed this relationship. With `the death of literature', the distinction between high and popular culture was no longer tenable, and the field of inquiry shifted from literary into cultural studies. Anthony Easthope argues that this new discipline must find a methodological consensus for its analysis of canonical and popular texts. Through a detailed criticism of competing theories (British cultural studies, New Historicism, cultural materialism) he shows how this new study should - and should not be done. Easthope's exploration of the problems, possibilities and politics of this new discipline includes an original reassessment of the question of literary value. By contrasting Conrad's Heart of Darkness with Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes, Easthope demonstrates how textuality sustains the opposition between high and popular culture darkness.

First published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. New Accents is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. This study presents insights into poetry as discourse ooking at language, conventual literary theory, and then a detailed look at the iambic pentameter, ballads in English Poetry, looking at Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. Also included is commentary on transparency looking at Pope's The Rape of the Lock, and Romanticism in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Wordworth's Tintern Abbey. Before ending on the future of poetry there is also a section on the Modernism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

First published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. New Accents is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. This study presents insights into poetry as discourse ooking at language, conventual literary theory, and then a detailed look at the iambic pentameter, ballads in English Poetry, looking at Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. Also included is commentary on transparency looking at Pope's The Rape of the Lock, and Romanticism in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Wordworth's Tintern Abbey. Before ending on the future of poetry there is also a section on the Modernism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

During the twentieth century, the medium of film has developed as a means of understanding the complexity of modern life. Since 1968, film theory has concentrated not so much on theme or content but on the deeper question of how the medium works on its viewer. Film theory has been profoundly influenced by the writings of such modern thinkers as Saussure, Freud, Lacan, Anthusser, Derrida and Kristeva. It combines modes of textual analysis relating to linguistics and semiology, a Marxist reading of ideology, and theories of subjectivity, the spectator and gender redefined by psychoanalysis.This judicious selection from key work by Stephen Heath, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doanne and others, represents some of the most important contemporary writing about film. It provides a consistent and developing analysis that will be of interest to students concerned with film and film studies, as well as students of cultural, media and communication studies.

During the twentieth century, the medium of film has developed as a means of understanding the complexity of modern life. Since 1968, film theory has concentrated not so much on theme or content but on the deeper question of how the medium works on its viewer. Film theory has been profoundly influenced by the writings of such modern thinkers as Saussure, Freud, Lacan, Anthusser, Derrida and Kristeva. It combines modes of textual analysis relating to linguistics and semiology, a Marxist reading of ideology, and theories of subjectivity, the spectator and gender redefined by psychoanalysis.This judicious selection from key work by Stephen Heath, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doanne and others, represents some of the most important contemporary writing about film. It provides a consistent and developing analysis that will be of interest to students concerned with film and film studies, as well as students of cultural, media and communication studies.

Through this exploration of the relation between Marxism, post-structuralism and the theory of the subject, first published in 1988, Antony Easthope contrasts the degree to which post-structuralism has made a radical impact on English and American national cultures. This book reprints an important interview in which Jacques Derrida discusses the