Hysterical realism, also called recherché postmodernism or maximalism is a literary genre characterized by chronic length, manic characters, madding action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story.

The term hysterical realism was coined by James Wood in an essay on Zadie Smith's White Teeth, titled "The Smallness of the 'Big' Novel: Human, All Too Inhuman", which appeared in the July 17, 2000 issue of The New Republic and was later reprinted in Wood's 2004 book, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. Wood used the term to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs". In response, Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth. . . "

Candidates for inclusion in the genre include: Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon,

Psychoanalytic literary criticism

Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism which, in method, concept, theory or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic reading has been practiced since the early development of psychoanalysis itself, and has developed into a rich and heterogeneous interpretive tradition.

Freud himself wrote several important essays on literature, which he used to explore the psyche of authors and characters, to explain narrative mysteries, and to develop new concepts in psychoanalysis (for instance, Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva). His sometime disciples and later readers, such as Carl Jung and later Jacques Lacan, were avid readers of literature as well, and used literary examples as illustrations of important concepts in their work (for instance, Lacan argued with Jacques Derrida over the interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter").

The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, at its very simplest, can be the psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character. In this directly therapeutic form, it is very similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. But many more complex variations are possible. The concepts of psychoanalysis can be deployed with reference to the narrative or poetic structure itself, without requiring access to the authorial psyche (an interpretation motivated by Lacan's remark that "the unconscious is structured like a language"). Or the founding texts of psychoanalysis may themselves be treated as literature, and re-read for the light cast by their formal qualities on their theoretical content (Freud's texts frequently resemble detective stories, or the archaeological narratives of which he was so fond).

External links

  • Psychoanalytic Theory and Criticism from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory:
    • Traditional Freudian Criticism (http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/psychoanalytic_theory_and_criticism-_1.html)
    • Reconceptualizing Freud (http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/psychoanalytic_theory_and_criticism-_2.html)
    • The Post-Lacanians (http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/psychoanalytic_theory_and_criticism-_3.html)

References

  • Ellmann, ed. Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. ISBN 0582083478.
  • Shoshana Felman, ed. Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. ISBN 080182754X.
  • Muller and Richardson, eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading. ISBN 0801832934

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Genre studies

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Genre studies is a structuralist approach to literary criticism, film criticism and other cultural criticism. It looks at the structural elements that combine in the telling of a story and find patterns in collections of stories. When these elements (or codes) begin to carry inherent information, a genre is emerging. A simple example of this is a Western movie where two men face each other on a dusty and empty road; one dons a black hat, the other white. Independent of any external meaning, there is no way to tell what the situation might mean, but due to the long development of the Western genre, it is clearn to the audience that it is a gunfight showdown between a good guy and a bad guy.

It has been suggested that genres resonate with people because of the familiarity, the short-hand communication, as well as nature of genres to shift with public mores. Many have considered genre storytelling as lesser forms of art because of the heavily borrowed nature of the conventions. However, admiration has grown. Proponents argue that the genius of an effective genre piece is in the variation, combinations, and evolution of the codes.

Genre studies has perhaps gained the most recognition in cinema theory, where it directly contrasts with the auteur theory of film criticism.

Neuroesthetics is a rapidly growing subdiscipline of neuroscience seeking to explain and understand the esthetics of domains such as art and music on a neurological basis. The field was pioneered by Semir Zeki of the University College London. Neuroesthetics directs attention to the bodily structure and response of an organism in an encounter with esthetic phenomenon such as art. Tools such as brain imaging and genetic analysis contribute to developing neuroesthetic knowledge.


A historical example of neuroesthetic interest is the reception of Byzantine portraits in the Babur empire under the rulership of Akbar [1] (http://www.galbithink.org/sense-s3.htm#recept). Byzantine portraits differed from Babur art of that time in a neurologically important way: the Byzantine portraits presented a large central figure making strong eye contact with the viewer. Across a wide range of organisms, direct eye contact is an assertion of presence hardwired into organisms through the social context of evolution. Byzantine portraits' novel artistic stimulation of this response helps to account for their sensational effects within the artistically advanced Babur empire.


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Auteur

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The term auteur (French for author) is used to describe film directors who are considered to be artists with their own unique vision. The style of an auteur is recognisable in his/her films regardless of their genre and subject matter. However, this style does not need to be purely visual—any unique point-of-view or obsession could be considered the mark of an auteur. It is more a stamp of the director's personality that marks a body of work as that of an auteur.

Some directors work in only one genre, and are still seen as auteurs (hence the somewhat derogatory phrases, schlock-auteur and horror-auteur, for those who work exclusively in those genres).

A director may of course be talented without being an auteur; directors such as Michael Curtiz and John Huston were great filmmakers but they are not usually considered auteurs because they did not have a recognisable style that appeared in all their films.


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List of auteurs

Well known auteurs include:

American auteurs

Australian auteurs

British auteurs

Canadian auteurs

French auteurs

German auteurs

Greek auteurs

Italian auteurs

Spanish auteurs


Law of noncontradiction

In logic, the law of noncontradiction judges as false any proposition P asserting that both proposition Q and its denial, proposition not-Q, are true at the same time and "in the same respect". In the words of Aristotle, "One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time."

More tersely, for any proposition P, it is not both the case that P and not-P. Symbolically, this is expressed as

\neg (P \wedge \neg P).

Bivalence and related laws examines how the law of non-contradiction is related to similar laws, such as the principle of bivalence, with which it should not be confused.

See also: Contradiction; Principle of explosion