Behind the ontological and epistemological separation of the realm of the senses and the realm of Ideas, of sensuousness and reason, of necessity and beauty, stands not only the rejection of a bad historical form of existence, but also its exoneration. – Marcuse[1] Marcuse’s essay on The Affirmative Character of Culture (1937) describes a culture [...]

‘Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.’ 1 – EB White (quoted in Gale 1996: xi) Don Quixote famously saw furious giants on his travels where the rest of the world saw windmills. Cervantes’ brand of humour here is striking because it exhibits its creation [...]

The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.1 -           Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands Critical theory has established itself as [...]

Saussure’s idea of semiotics was the instigation of a new movement in the philosophy of language. Its central tenet of the arbitrary relation of reality to language, the notion of language as a conventionally agreed upon system used to map out the world, had obvious ramifications for the perception of the world and our relation [...]

A primary scope for postcolonial theory would be to provide a backdrop for the analysis of that literature which portrays a colonised land and its aftermath; a literature which is, first and foremost, rooted in socio-politics. Postcolonial theory is most commonly applied to African, Australian, Indian and some American literatures; however this is too narrow [...]

The rhetoric of Slavoj Žižek’s cultural critique is steeped firmly in spectacle and popular culture. He is a vibrant and colourful public intellectual who assaults his listeners with a Leftist dialectic that nonetheless seems to revel in the products of the capitalist system – without them, Žižek’s work would surely be maimed of its characteristic [...]

One of Foucault’s most controversial claims was that our notion of man and all that it includes is merely a product of the modern epistemic epoch, which he says is on the decline. While humanism declared man the creator of discourse and science, Foucault maintains that ‘we do not produce science, it produces us’. 1 [...]