accent. Accent usually refers to differences of pronunciation -- deviations from the standard -- by which the speaker might be socially and/or culturally categorised (in terms of class, region, ethnicity). These deviations are implicitly seen as inferior. For many writers ? particularly working class, regional and post-colonial writers ? accent and dialect is an important strategy in their work, acting to assert an identity different from and resistant to the standard by which they feel themselves marginalised. eg. Tony Harrison, Robert Burns, Derek Walcott, Roddy Doyle, Linton Kwesi Johnson, James Kelman, Irving Welsh.

against the grain. Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History writes: 'There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.' In particular, cultural materialist critics, in reading texts against the grain, seek out the social, ideological 'unconscious' of the text ? its gaps and silences ? thereby resisting the works naturalisation.

agency. Literally activeness. In cultural-political terms, the notion of agency usually refers to the subject (or person) acting to determine an event taking control for themselves. As such, empowerment is a central issue:- whether or not that subject is in a position of power and therefore agency.

alienation. In addition to the general modernist or existential sense of alienation as a feeling of exclusion, unbelonging and loneliness, the terms has a quite specific marxist usage. Here, the concept of alienation refers to workers relation to the product of his/her labour ? that which s/he produces, but does not own and which becomes a commodity. Marx suggests that this relation is as to an alien object.'

alterity. An absolute Otherness which cannot be incorporated by the (more powerful) Self. Poststructuralism sees binary oppositions as a violent hierarchy, in which the Self seeks to neutralise the Other by incorporating, assimilating or domesticating them. Alterity is the recognition a radical, unassimilable difference.

androgyny. Technically referring to the union of both sexes in one individual, this term is often equated with hermaphrodism. Feminist writers and critics, though, use it to refer to the culturally, rather than biologically, determine characteristics. Androgyny is sometimes celebrated as a liberating vision of wholeness through the blurring or break down of false gender categories. See, for example, Angela Carters novel The Passion of New Eve.

aporia. From the Greek meaning 'unpassable path' or 'impasse'. Term is particularly associated with deconstruction and the work of Jacques Derrida, and is used describe moments when meaning cannot be satisfactorily decided -- moments of 'undecideability'.

arche-writing / archi-trace. Jacques Derrida uses this term in reference to Sigmund Freuds notion of the mystic writing pad ? a childrens writing pad consisting of a wax slab covered by a double top sheet. Messages would appear when inscribed with a hard stylus, and seem to disappear when the top sheet was detached. However, the writing would always remain imprinted on the underlying wax and for Freud, this was analogous to the unconscious, where memories remain invisibly. For Derrida, no perception or expression is virginal, but is always structured by a pre-existing realm of signification -- a realm of arche-writing.

author. Michel Foucault points out that one cannot become an author by writing any old thing -- a letter, for example. 'The Author' is a cultural construction. Equally, as Roland Barthes argues, the author is seen to be a special kind of person:- the apparently settled, whole, rational self which post-structuralism has sought to undermine. Author, significantly, is etymologically linked to authority, authorize, authoritarian, etc..

base / superstructure. Think of an elaborate statue on a sturdy base. In Marxist analyses of how societies work, the base refers to the economic system and relations within that society its so-called 'mode of production'. The superstructure of the society, then, is the elaborate statue. This is societys institutions its education system, church, legal system, political system, the arts. Clearly, the base supports the superstructure. Indeed, Marxists argue that economic systems and relations determine the societys institutions. Importantly, these institutions then (sometimes unknowingly) function to normalise the prevailing economic system and relations. The superstructure, then, is the realm of ideology.

binary oppositions. The structuralist name for opposed terms which are structured into a power relation, (or 'violent hierarchy', for Derrida) - eg. self/other, masculine/feminine, black/white, civilian/barbarian. The notion derives from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, who pointed out the relational features of language.

biological determinism. The idea that certain characteristics and differences -- between sexes, genders, races, classes -- are innate or natural. This is one of the main targets of cultural theory which, broadly speaking, seeks to promote notions of social and ideological determinism.

bourgeois. The marxist term for the middle classes whose interest it is to preserve the status quo. The term has therefore come to stand for conventionality per se.

canon. The literary canon is the body of texts conventionally considered to be worthwhile or even great. But whose judgement counts as to what constitutes great literature, and whose interests are served by this choice?

capitalism. An economic system built upon the profit motive. Capitalism depends upon private individuals or companies investing money in order to make profits. In Marxist analysis, these profits are secured by exploiting workers who provide their labour.

closure. Language, for poststructuralists, functions according to différance - an interplay of the difference and the deferral of meaning. Meaning is never even present, so how can it ever be fixed or closed? It can't, says Derrida.

the cogito. Shorthand for the 17^th century French 'rationalist' philosopher Rene Descartes's famous assertion: 'I think, therefore I am' ('cogito ergo sum'). For Descartes, his thought-processes proved his own existence beyond doubt. Recent critics have shown that, despite his attempts to escape all assumptions and arrive at 'pure', indubitable truth, Descartes's philosophy is based upon a dubious notion of identity as whole, rational, coherent and essential.

commodity. An article which exists primarily for economic exchange.

commodification. The process by which an object or person becomes a commodity. Capitalist society, which is structured around economic exchange, is seen by many critics to commodify the whole world.

commodity fetishism. Fetishism is the unconscious attempt to fill a lack by displacing that (usually sexual) desire onto something else ? often an object. In marxist theory, commodity fetishism occurs because the worker is alienated from the product of his/her labour. The worker then confuses the use value of an object with the exchange value placed upon it capitalist society (ie. its economic value). This is knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing See also the psychoanalytical notion of fetishism.

connotation/denotation. If denotation is the dictionary definition of a word its precise meaning then connotation is the word's meaning by association those meanings which are conventionally related to it. For example, a red rose connoting 'love'.

context. Everything surrounding the text:? eg. the social, cultural, political, historical, artistic, financial, publication factors surrounding the texts production. And equally, the factors surrounding the reception of the text as it is read ? your context as reader.

creole. Hybrid language forms which have developed, usually in colonial contexts. Creoles differ from 'pidgin' language forms because they have developed all the major features and functions of a language, and have native speakers: 'Many Afro-Caribbean englishes are creoles, carrying traces of other languages of empire Spanish, Portugese, French and Dutch as well as of many native, non-European languages. Creoles are languages palpably in the making, much as the European vernaculars formed after the Roman Empire. (Rob Pope, The English Studies Book (Routledge, 1998), p.365.)

cultural capital. According to Pierre Bourdieu, this is what you are acquiring at university: cultural capital is the value which even dog-eat-dog capitalist society attaches to education.

cultural materialism. A form of marxist criticism, most associated with Raymond Williams, and centred around a socialist critique of literature, culture and the institutions which maintain them. Cultural materialists see language and texts as sites of ideological struggle, and emphasise the subversive and revolutionary aspects which can be highlighted by reading texts against the grain. See also new historicism.

deconstruction. Deconstruction refers to the critical approach suggested by the work of poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida. For our purposes, deconstruction can be seen to dismantle the assumptions and presuppositions around notions of identity which circulate in society. By attending closely to language, deconstruction seeks to problematise all notions of knowledge, meaning and identity - showing these to be falsely constructed, and bound up with structures of power and exclusion.

defamiliarisation. The Russian Formalist critics believed that what made literature 'literary' was its ability to 'defamiliarize' the world -- to present it in radically new ways and thereby to disrupt habitual reactions.

desire. Desire refers to an unconscious driving force. In psychanalytic theory, the process of socialization is characterized by lack of fulfilment in various respects. This lack produces desire. 

diachronic / synchronic. Terms used by Ferdinand de Saussure in his linguistic study. Diachronic means across time. So, a diachronic study of language is one which takes concentrates on its historical evolution. A synchronic study, on the other hand ? for example Saussurean linguistics ? is static rather than evolutionary, and would take a particular moment and concentrate on the structures of language at that moment.

dialectics. As distinct from dialect. Derived from the Greek term meaning a process of debate or argument which gives rise to a truth ? especially when contradictions are exposed in ones opponent. Dialectical philosophies see the things in the world as existing in dynamic relationships and containing internal tensions and contradictions. The dialectical philosophy of G.W.F.Hegel (where a thesis is opposed by an antithesis, and the result of this clash is a synthesis) was built upon by Marx and Engels, who viewed class struggle and capitalism in terms of these dialectical tensions and contradictions.

dialectical materialism. A branch of philosophy which prioritizes matter over mind (as distinct from idealism), and which stresses that this material reality is in a constant state of tension, struggle and transformation. Marxists, for example, see history in these terms.

dialogism. Refers to Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtins conception of the fundamentally multiple character of language, meaning and identity. For Bakhtin, meaning is not created within a single, sovereign consciousness, but is always produced in-between. In a conversation, for example, all utterances contain the trace of the other, are generated with the other in mind. Central to the notion of dialogism is the existence of equal, independent otherness ? another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable of responding on an equal footing, another and equal I (thou). As a result of this, the theory has been very influential in a number of fields -- post-colonialism, for example, where it is interpreted as a theory of cultural identity.

diaspora. A term for mass migration, used particularly in post-colonial studies to denote the scattering of peoples away from their homelands under pressures such as colonization or slavery.

diegesis. Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette use this term to describe description or narration which appears to be judgement-free.

différance. Jacques Derridas pun on difference and deferral, which is how language and meaning is seen to function. For Ferdinand de Saussure, meaning is not inherent in any linguistic sign, but is generated as a result of differences between signs. Furthermore, there is no necessary connection between the signifier and the signified. That they seem to 'meet' is simply a matter of social convention. In fact, the signifier can never fully represent the signified, and meaning is never as stable or fixed as we might like to believe. Meaning rests upon a lack. There is always the potential for slippage, and this is something which many critics delight in exploiting.

discourse. Michel Foucault saw a discourse as a system of ideas or knowledge, inscribed in a specific vocabulary (e.g. psychoanalysis, anthropology, cultural/literary studies):- large groups of statements. The important thing, for Foucault, was that such discourses were used to legitimate the exercise of power over certain persons by categorizing them as particular 'types'.

displacement. Freudian term for the replacement of one psychic figure with a tangentially related image: for example, a dream about seeking to get a novel published by Penguin Books resulting in a dream about penguins(!) Jacques Lacan likens metonymy in language and literature to displacement.

dissemination. Jacques Derridas term (from his 1981 book of the same title) describing the endless play of signifiers in the absence of concrete attachment to signifieds: the seed [of meaning] that neither inseminates nor is recovered by the father [the author], but is scattered abroad.

dream interpretation. For Freud, a dream is like a piece of literature, containing various 'literary' devices, eg.: condensation (condensing various meanings into one image); displacement (metonymy, tropes, allusions); regressive transformation (replacing ideas and feelings with images); secondary revision (making everything fit into a story). The dreamer is therefore an 'author'.

écriture féminine. This term refers to a concept of womens writing, associated with French feminist critics such as Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, and often seen to be indirectly derived from Virginia Woolf. This writing resists the 'phallogocentric' characteristics of conventional, 'rational' language use and is associated with unconscious drives -- with 'irrationality', jouissance and the energies of the body. Paradoxically, perhaps, Cixous cites james Joyce as the best exemplar. 

ego. Freud divides the psyche into three parts: the ego, the id and the superego. The ego is the 'rational' part of the psyche.

empiricism / empirical. Branch of philosophy which sees all knowledge as being based in experience -- for example, the experience of the senses -- as distinct from theory or logic.

épistémè. Based on the Greek word for knowledge, this term refers to an epistemological era ? the beliefs, assumptions, categorisations which come to dominate a particular period.

epistemology. The theoretical study of knowledge:? what knowledge is; how it might be assessed; what the grounds/assumptions for an idea might be; what claims to truth might be made; whether true knowledge can be achieved.

essentialism. This term is at the crux of the politics of identity and refers to a particular way of thinking about what it means to have an identity. At its crudest, essentialism is biological determinism and sees identity as a pure, unchanging essence of race or sex or class rather than something which is socially or culturally constructed. A particular 'category' of people can therefore be located as 'just naturally' better at, say, athletics, or government, or digging roads, or banking. See also, biological determinism.

etymology. The history and derivation of words, and their study.

eurocentrism. As the name suggests, the privileging of European culture, beliefs, values, religions, to the extent that these have been naturalised ? often through imperialism.

false consciousness. Marxist term for the effects of ideology. See ideology.

feminism. Toril Moi distinguishes between femaleness (sex ? a biological category), femininity (gender ? a set of culturally defined characteristics) and feminism (a political position).

fetishism. Fetishism in psychoanalysis refers to an over-investment in a strangely (unnaturally) attractive object, person or practice. For Freud, this desire is driven by a significant but unconscious absence or lack, which is then displaced onto something else. As always with Freud, the lack of the phallus is significant for women, the castration complex for men. See also the marxist notion of commodity fetishism.

formalism. The Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century sought to foreground the literariness of literature. Critics such as Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum and Victor Shklovsky focused on the formal aspects of the text which functioned to defamiliarise normal, everday experience. See also 'defamiliarisation'.

frankfurt school. A group of left-wing, Jewish thinkers including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin. Based in Germany during the 1930s before fleeing to America with the rise of the Nazis. Their focus was upon problems of culture and ideology, in particular the mass media and the problem of commodity fetishism. Mass culture, for Frankfurt School critics such as Adorno, encourages conformity with the status quo.

gaze. The concept of the gaze is derived largely from the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan concerning the formation of subjectivity (see 'The Mirror Stage'). The gaze represents power: the one who looks is in the position of power over the one who is looked at. Feminist film critics have used this term to analyse way that mainstream films maintain patriarchal norms. Laura Mulvey, for example, points out that the audience is positioned as male through identification with a male protagonist, and is encouraged to accept representations of women from this male perspective. See Laura Mulveys Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) [in NATC].

gender. As distinct from 'sex' (which is biological), gender usually refers to socially/culturally constructed (invented) characteristics which are then attributed to the different biological sexes. If sex is 'female and male'; then gender is 'femininity and masculinity'.

genealogy. A term Michel Foucault (after Nietzsche) uses to describe a process of historical interrogation, tracing the discourses that have produced knowledge over time.

genre. A category of cultural practice:- drama or poetry are referred to as genres; equally, so are the psychological thriller or vampire novel.

globalization. The Marxist critic of postmodernism Fredric Jameson argues that American capitalism, in the form of huge multi-national corporations backed by the Western media, is (re)colonizing the world. This 'coca-colonisation' of the globe is seen to result in a cultural homogenisation as 'native' cultures are swallowed up by Western values.

grand narrative / master narrative. Term associated with postmodernism. The grand narrative is usually a 'totalising' ideological system (religious fundamentalism or patriarchy or Nazism, for example). Grand narratives are usually self-legitimating -- they purport to contain all answers to everything (transcendental truth). The grand narrative is seen to be characteristic of modernity.

hegemony. The word hegemony derives from the Greek term egemonia or emenon, meaning leader, ruler of political predominance. The Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci developed this concept as a refinement of marxist notions of ideology, demonstrating the psychocultural aspects of control, and the role of cultural institutions within this. True control, Gramsci believed, is achieved bot by coercion but by gaining the people's consent for this control. This is not done by the army but through the social and cultural realms where it is more effectively invisible, more pervasive. Hegemony 'saturates' even what we think of as 'common sense' as it becomes part of our lived system of meanings and values. The concept is central to Althusser's Gramscian redefinition of ideology in the 1970s.

hermeneutics The science or practice of interpretation. Assumes that the text remains as written, painted, or recorded but that its interpretation changes between historical periods, across cultures, etc.

heterogeneity/ heterogeneous. Multiplicity or variety, as opposed to homogeneity.

heteroglossia. A term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe the many-voicedness of language. Although languages (eg. English) present themselves as unified and homogeneous (monoglossic), Bakhtin shows that they are actually always fractured and stratified (heteroglossic). For example they include traces of other national languages (English is made up of archaic Norman, German, Latin, contemporary French, American English, etc.). Equally, language is split along social, cultural, professional lines: scouse or estuary english, for example, or estate-agent-speak, academic English, military or police idioms, etc., etc.. No language, and no identity, is as unified and homogeneous as it claims.

hommelette. Lacans dodgy pun (little man) for the pre-Oedipal unformed pre-subject, who has no sense of self distinct from not-self.

homogeneity/ homogeneous. Sameness, as opposed to heterogeneity.

homology. A correspondance or structural parallel. In literary works, similarities and correspondancies might establish a pattern or structural repetition. Similarly, critics finds homologies between, for example, the structure of a language and the structure of the unconscious (see Lacan).

homosocial. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick uses this term to describe single-sex relationships usually between men. For Sedgwick, the term refers to the homoerotic impulses which, she argues, are often concealed behind an overt homophobia (fear/hatred of homosexuals): to misquote Shakespeare, Methinks the Loaded-reading "new lad" doth protest too much.

humanism. The object of much critique, humanism is a description of a position which believes human identity is the result of the individuals human essence, rather than the influence of social or cultural factors. Humanism is thus an idealist, even essentialist, philosophy, rather than realist or materialist.

hybridity/hybridisation. Most associated with postcolonialism, hybridity is a description of the inevitably mixed, interpenetrated condition of cultures, languages, etc. The critic Stuart Hall suggests that we are all mongrels, especially after colonialism, and that any notion of authentic, essentialist identity is untenable. For example, any right-wing English recourse to a notion of pure Anglo-Saxon culture would seem to be disproved by the very compund status of that description. The novelist Salman Rushdie argues that there is nothing lost in translation, but always something to be gained. 

id. For Sigmund Freud, the psyche is divided into three parts (the ego, the superego and the id). The id represents pure instinct basic drives to fulfil instinctual needs and desires. The new-born child is all id, Freud argues. During socialisation,however, the psyche splits, adding ego and superego.

idealism. A branch of philosophy which stresses the role of the mind in our acquisition of knowledge about the world. In extreme, solipsistic versions, idealism becomes a theory where reality is seen to be nothing more than the activity of ones own mind ? nothing exists but oneself. More usually, however, idealists point out that the way we experience the external world is necessarily affected by the activity of the mind.

ideology. A complex term, but in (very) short, ideology refers to a belief system or world-view; a coherent structure of thinking which obscures incongruous elements in order to uphold a particular social order.

imaginary / symbolic. Jacques Lacan distinguishes between a time before the child is socialised, and the time after entry into society and language. The imaginary is the former -- a condition remembered as one of wholeness and identity when the child is at one with the mothers body. The 'Symbolic Order', on the other hand, is society the domain of language and power relations. After the mirror stage, and having acquired an identity within societys network of power relations, the subject can never feel the fulfilment or wholeness which is nostalgically remembered from the Imaginary.

intentional fallacy. This term is used by W.K.Wimsatt & M.C.Beardsley to describe the dubious critical practice of seeking to decipher a texts meaning by determining the authors intentions. For them, the authors intentions can never be properly determined, but even if they could, a text should in any case only be analysed in its own terms, ignoring any extra-textual information. Roland Barthess notion of the Death of the Author provides a very different set of reasons as to the fallacy of intentionality.

interpellation. When Louis Althusser seeks to describe how ideology actually works, he argues that we, as subjects, actually subject ourselves to the power of ideology. This is because we identify with subject positions or categories of identity which are predetermined within ideological frameworks. Our process of identification with these identities is called interpellation a process of (mis)recognition with an identity offered in society. Althusser uses the example of being hailed by an authority figure: a priest, an educator or a policeman, for example, might 'hail' me, by saying 'Oi, you!'. I might then turn around and see myself as the addressee. Thus Althusser hopes to show how ideologies either 'recruit' people to particular, acceptable subject positions in society, or else transform individuals into subjects who learn to identify with certain representations.

intertextuality. Texts exist in cultural and aesthetic contexts alongside other texts. They influence one another and often refer to one another overtly, this being a particular characteristic of postmodernist writing. In fact, all language is itself intertextual, since language always pre-exists the speaker: words and meanings are always second-hand in some sense.

langue and parole. Ferdinand de Saussure distinguishes between langue (the whole language system ? the rules) and parole (the actual, specific instance of individuals language use).

liberal humanism. A cultural-political position which holds to the essential decency of human beings and which promotes democracy, individualism, tolerance, rationality, civilised values, etc.. Over the past thirty years, liberal humanism has been shown to rest on a series of generalized assumptions about humanity which in fact hide distasteful realities and differences of power and wealth. The promotion of Western values abroad, for example, can be seen to be complicit with the brutalities of imperialism; the notion of individualism can be seen at the very basis of capitalism with all its inequalities at home.

liminal. A term favoured particularly by post-colonial critics, and which refers to the thresholds, boundaries and borderlines of binary constructions (black/white, masculine/feminine, Englishness/Irishness). These oppositions are often false, producing blurring and gaps which might be exploited in order to deconstruct these oppositions.

lisible / scriptible. Roland Barthes distinguishes between two types of text the readable and writerly respectively. The former are transparent or realist texts where the reader does not have to work at reading, and becomes merely a passive consumer. The more difficult scriptible texts (such as modernist writing), on the other hand, make the reader work and therefore disrupt conventional meanings. 

logocentrism. Logos is Greek for word, speech or reason, terms which can connote law or truth. Thus Jacques Derrida sees Western culture as inherently logocentric in that it revolves around a central set of truths which are purported to be universal principles.

manicheanism. A dualistic view of the world seeing things simplistically in terms of black/white, good/evil, etc..

marginality. The position of being on the margins of the dominant culture.

marxism. Marxism is a term used to refer to a hugely diverse set of social, economic, historical, philosophical and cultural theories, only some of them derived from the thought of German philosopher Karl Marx. Broadly speaking, marxist theories focus upon the inequalities of wealth which the capitalist economic system brings, and point to the effects of this exploitative system upon people and cultures. The Marxist analysis of this situation and its products is ultimately designed to bring about its replacement with a fairer, socialist system.

master/slave dialectic. G.W.F.Hegels abstract drama of master versus slave stands at the basis of many contemporary theories of subjectivity. Hegel shows the human search for identity as an interaction between two beings, each of which is battling for recognition of their status as an independent Self. For Hegel, self-consciousness depends upon such recognition. It is therefore likely that the stronger of the two beings will enslave and objectify the other, using this Other merely as a mirror to certify the superior identity of the Self. However, the recognition provided by this object will prove unsatisfactory it needs to be an equal, independent consciousness who does the recognizing. For Hegel, then, true self-consciousness can only exist in being recognised by another, autonomous individual. See also dialogism.

medium. The material vehicle for communication ? speech, writing, paint, ink, film, photography, etc.

metaphor and metonymy. A metaphor is a comparison in which one linguistic sign is substituted by another: he was a terrier in midfield. (A simile, on the other hand, is a comparison which is signalled:- he was like a terrier.). Metonymy is the substitution of a concept by a part of it:- eg. reference to the world of boxing as the ring or to thespianism as the stage, reference to a car as a motor. Poststructuralist theorists emphasise the way in which all language is in fact a kind of metaphor and metonymy.

metaphysics. A branch of philosophy exploring the nature of reality or being, and usually finding the answers outside the physical world in God, for example.

mimicry. The postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha suggests that one of the ways in which the colonized writes back to the centre is through an adoption, incorporation and subversion of the dominant cultural code. This might be seen, for example, in the use of non-standard forms of english. For Bhabha, the colonizer experiences this as a mimicry which undermines the foundations of its constructed superiority.

mirror stage. Jacques Lacan argues that the moment when a child first recognizes its own reflection in a mirror represents its socialization its entry into the Symbolic Order of language and power relations. Prior to this moment the child had almost believed itself to be part of its mothers body, but now begins to develop a sense of self-identity. However, Lacan sees this recognition of itself in the mirror as a misrecognition, because the mirror image (the identity adopted) was merely an image or sign of the self. This is never at one with the actual experience of self (which is far more fragmented than the unified mirror image). Like a linguistic sign, which is always an unsatisfactory representation of something in the world, our identities are built on unstable foundations.

mode of production. The Marxist term for the economic system of a society. See Base/Superstructure.

monologism. see dialogism.

multi-accentuality. Mikhail Bakhtin sees all signs as inherently multiple, hybrid, multi-accentual in that they always carry within them a variety of possible meanings.

nation. The act of drawing up borderlines defining a nation-state and a national identity is deeply problematic. On what criteria do you define a nation racial essence? shared language? hair colour? size of ears? Who belongs and who is excluded, and who decides? Nations like to see themselves as natural phenomena, but are in fact imagined communities, to use Benedict Andersons term. National identities are always defined, and serve the interests of, the most powerful group in the nation-state. Therefore, the act of defining a national identity is necessarily an act of excluding, marginalizing or scapegoating minority groups.

nationalism. Frantz Fanon saw the nationalist resistance of colonized groups against the imperial power as a beautiful and splendid necessity. The nationalism which Gandhi mobilised against British rule in India, for example, was designed to counter what was seen as unjust government by a foreign power. Fanon was also one of the first to warn against its dangers and inadequacies (see The Wretched of the Earth). Nazism stands as the most brutal of many expressions of nationalism in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

nativism / négritude. The belief in the importance of asserting an authentic ethnic identity in the face of imperialism, often linked to the practice of producing an indigenous literature. Associated with Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor.

neuroses. Psychic disorders which, according to Freud can be obsessional, hysterical or phobic and which may be cured through psychoanalysis.

new criticism. This refers to a group of American critics of the 1930s and 40s, and their English counterparts I.A.Richards and William Empson. For the New Critics, a literary text should be approached as a unified whole. Attention to historical context was less important than the aesthetic features, the interrelation of verbal features and the ensuing complexities of meaning. The task of the critic, therefore, revolved around close attention to ambiguity, paradox, irony, poetic imagery, etc., in order to show the contribution of each element to the overall unified structure of the text.

new historicism. A form of marxist criticism. New historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt often focus upon texts from far-removed historical contexts - eg. rennaissance drama. Their aim is to highlight the power relations at work not only at the texts moment of production, but also at the moment of the texts reproduction - ie. the moment at which we, in the present, read texts from our own particular position in history and society.

normativity. The privileging of socially constructed norms, against which deviations are classed as abnormal eg. heterosexuality/homosexuality.

objectification. The positioning of Others as objects for the benefit of the Self see Hegels Master/Slave dialectic.

oedipus complex. In Oedipus Rex, the Aeschylus play, Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and sleeps with his mother. Freud believes that this dramatises a primal human desire because the process of a childs socialization revolves around the development of an unconscious libidinal attachment to the mother, alongside a jealous rivalry with the father. In Freuds theories, the unsatisfactory workingthrough of the Oedipus Complex lies at the root of many neuroses. Freud is really only interested in men, and although he did draw up a corresponding theory to explain a similar primal desire in females (the Electra Complex), this is pretty unconvincing.

ontology. A branch of philosophy focusing upon the origins, essence and meaning of being.

orientalism. Edward Saids term for an entire discourse through which the colonial Other is represented by the West as subordinate, thus providing an intellectual foundation for material domination ? ie. for imperial and economic exploitation.

the other. The relationship of Self to Other is a relationship of normality to marginality, and is always a power relationship ? a binary opposition or violent hierarchy. The Other can be different from the Norm in a variety of senses: race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, etc..

patriarchy. Male dominance: literally the rule of the father; technically government by men, either in the family or in society, with authority and materialities such land being passed from father to son.

phallus. The phallus ? the metaphorical penis ? signifies power. See Oedipus Complex. See also phallocentrism.

phallocentrism. Critics such as Lacan and Derrida argue that in patriarchal Western culture, the Father represents the Law. The power associated with masculinity is symbolised by the phallus (that which femininity lacks). Women, and femininity, are defined in relation to men, become the Other to the norm of the male Self. See logocentrism and phallologocentrism.

phallogocentrism. Jacques Derridas combination of phallo- and logo-centrism. The term suggests that western culture is obsessed with origins and centres, and that the specific origin and centre around which it revolves is bound up with both the phallus and the logos (masculinity as the Law, as God, as reason, as the true Word). See logocentrism and phallocentrism.

phenomenology. Branch of philosophy which emphasises that meaning is generated through the influence of a persons consciousness upon perceptions.

positivism. Branch of philosophy which emphasises the observable and factual over the theoretical or metaphysical.

post-colonialism. A term used to describe the study of cultures who have emerged from colonial rule and who are undergoing the processes of decolonisation. This, as post-colonial theory makes clear, is far more complicated than merely gaining political independence. Colonized cultures will be saturated with the influence of the imperial power from language, through its education system to the economic and political systems imposed during colonization. How does a former colony make the best of a situation in which it may never be able to escape the legacy of colonialism? 

postmodernism. Not so much a stage after modernism, more an impulse to deconstruct totalising systems of knowledge, meaning or belief grand narratives in the terminology of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (religions, for example, or grand political theories such as capitalism or communism, or nationalisms, or humanist theories of identity). The postmodern condition, for Lyotard, is that of living without such systems or myths; for Derrida this is about celebrating this advent of an open future. The emphasis here on the fragmentation of identities has been very controversial. Fredric Jameson terms postmodernism the cultural logic of late capitalism, and many critics have seen postmodernism as running counter to the common contemporary need for collective identities which resist the workings of power. See also grand narratives.

post-structuralism. Like structuralism, rejects the notion of the human subject as cogito and emphasises the slippery, linguistic basis of all identity, meaning, knowledge and power. The centrality of language to poststructuralist conceptions of subjectivity and culture is shown in Derridas famous dictum: il ny a pas dhors texte (there is no outside-text, or there is nothing outside context). Because everything is part of a unstable language system, post-structuralists draw attention to the radical instability at the foundation of textual and social meanings which appear natural.

primal scene. In Freudian psychoanalysis, this refers to a moment in a childs development when significant desires, fears, needs and anxieties are generated, thus structuring that childs psyche.

psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytical theory has had a huge impact upon literary studies, mainly through the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Psychoanalysis is variously a mode of interpretation, a theory about the formation of the subject (a theory of identity and language), an apparatus through which to understand the workings of ideology in culture.

race. Race is often seen to be an arbitrary, socially constructed category. This is not to say that there are not differences between people, but that the means by which certain peoples have been distinguished, categorized and subordinated across history, are usually spurious.

rationalism. Branch of philosophy which emphasises reason or intellect, rather than observation or sensory perception, as the basis for knowledge and truth. See also the cogito.

reification. In marxist theory, reification refers to the process of depersonalisation and alienation which capitalism induces.

representation. The power of representation is the power to survey, define, categorize, stereotype and assert power over the represented.

repression. For Freud, unwanted or taboo thoughts, desires, fears, anxieties get repressed into the unconscious. They do not disappear, though, and the return of the repressed may take a variety of forms tics, dreams, slips of the tongue, etc., as well as neuroses, psychoses and compulsions.

semiotics / semiology. The term semiology refers to the science of signs, and derives from the Greek logos ("words") semeion("about signs"). In Mythologies, Roland Barthes develops a study of social semiotics the connotations which social and cultural signs carry in popular culture and especially advertising. Confusingly, Julia Kristeva also uses the term semiotic to mean something quite different. For Kristeva, the semiotic is a kind of language which is associated with the Unconscious, or more accurately Lacans realm of the Imaginary. This language is jouissance and carries the incoherent desires, drives and pulsions of the uncoordinated pre-subject, then. There is a link to ecriture feminine.

sexuality. Term generally used to refer to sexual orientation. In Freudian psychoanalysis, sexuality is formed in the gradual organization of the libidinal drives to focus upon a particular object. The character of that object depends upon the subjects particular path through the various stages of psychic development.

signifier / signified. For Ferdinand de Saussure, the sign comes in two parts. The Signifier is the vehicle for meaning ie. a sound or series of lines on a page which form a word, or it could equally be a logo. The Signified is that which is denoted by the signifier:- ie. the object or concept or person which the signifier sought to represent. Saussure argues that any meaning occurs through a combination, a meeting of the two. But this is a combination which is arbitrary:- ie. the series of shapes chair might equally have developed to signify this computer screen. Equally, the meeting may never occur and you may never know what I mean by the following signifier: SOLIPSISM.

solipsism. The notion that it is impossible ever to know another person, so why bother? This ends up in an absolute egotism a refusal to acknowledge the needs or even existence of others.

standard. A standard is a flag it is therefore a symbol of centralised, uniform identity and power, and also a benchmark of quality. In Britain, Standard English is supposedly the correct form of English, and RP (received pronunciation) the proper accent. It has this status because it has historically been associated with the dominant social and cultural groups in this country. Other forms have historically been associated with subordinate classes (working classes), ethnicities (minority and colonised groups), regions (anywhere that isnt the south east of England), and are devalued by being classed as a deviation from the norm.

stereotype. A politicised myth which has been generated through discourse and which serves to maintain conventional power relations.

subaltern. The Indian critic Gayatri Spivak borrows this term from Antonio Gramsci to describe dominated, subordinated and marginalized groups especially those who are doubly oppressed, such as colonised women.

structuralism. A school of thought which built up around a group of French thinkers in the 1950s and 60s. Figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss (in anthropology), Roland Barthes (in literary and cultural studies), Jacques Lacan (in psychoanalysis) and Louis Althusser (in marxist theory) were influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and pursued an interest in how meaning is produced. Rather than focusing upon consciousness (of an author, for example) as the locus of meaning, the structuralists analysed underlying structures such as those of language, of the psyche, and of society. These, it was argued, were crucial in the development of meaning.

the subject / subjectivity. The subject is seen to be that which acts and speaks, which says I. Humanist notions of personal identity as natural are critiqued in recent theory, and replaced by the notion that identity is formed when individuals are subjected to forces outside themselves ideology for example.

superego. The third part of the Freudian model of the psyche, the others being the id and ego. The superego is involved with conscience and the imposition of moralityupon the wild id.

superstructure. See Base and Superstructure

symbolic order. See imaginary / symbolic.

synchronic. see diachronic and synchronic

teleology. From telos which means an ultimate end or conclusion. Teleology refers to any grand narrative, such as the idea of history as progress (an idea shared by both European imperialism and marxism) towards an end when one idea will dominate, or be totalised (western civilization, for example, or Marxist communism). Teleological theories tend to privilege one narrative (that of western values, for example, or that of class), to the exclusion of all others.

text / textuality. From the Latin texere, meaning to weave, and the term text implies the fabric of culture itself the complex network of contexts, threads and traces which combine to generate meanings generated when we read. We ourselves are as much a part of this text as the book.

transference. In psychoanalysis, as the patient talks to the analyst, s/he transfers his conflicts onto analyst. This creates a controlled situation, a form of repetition of the conflict, in which the analyst can intervene. What is repaired in analysis is not quite what is wrong in real life, but the patient is able to construct a new narrative for herself, in which she can interpret and make sense of the disturbances from which she suffers.

typology. A system or method by which people or things can be classified as a particular type. See also discourse.

unconscious. Freud argues that aspects of our conscious life which are socially/culturally taboo or forbidden, or which are traumatic, become repressed. The Unconscious is thus constructed out of repressed instincts, desires, fears and anxieties. Although our Unconscious is completely unknowable to us, it does manifest itself in disguised form for example in Freudian slips, neuroses, compulsions and dreams. Jacques Lacan argues that the Unconscious presents itself in metaphorical and metonymic form ie. it uses literary devices. These, Freud and Lacan argue, must then be read and decoded by a psychoanalyst in order to reveal their true meaning.

universalism. This refers to a humanist tendency to generalize about human nature as if all humans have essentially the same experience of being alive regardless of, for example, economic, gender or racial differences.