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Period: to
Timespan
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Karl Marx - Das Kapital
Karl Marx was socialist who believed that we live in a capitalist society and that there is two classes in society:
Proletariat - Laborers and working class. Accepted the power of the Bourgeoisie.
Bourgeoisie - The upper class and the rich. They own different types of capital and dominate/exploit the proletariat by using their ideologies, values and beliefs to gain their trust. -
Sigmund Freud - The Interpretations Of Dreams
- He believes dreams are made of wishful fulfillment
- Created the 'Castration Complex' which means becoming aware of sexual differences
- 'Oedipal Triangles', relationship triangle between 3 people that has conflict
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Ferdinand De Saussure - Course in general linguistics
Structuralist:
Signifier = Image, what it is.
Signified = The meaning, Connotations. Context. -
The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School was established in 1923. -
Theodor Adorno - The Culture Industry
"Media is designed to keep us distracted, unable to understand ourselves and without the will to alter political reality'' -
Walter Benjamin-The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
“History is written by the victors.”
“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.” -
Theodor Adorno - Dialectic of Enlightenment
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society.
Dialectic of Enlightenment - "Technology … aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital." -
Antonio Gramsci - Prison Notebooks
Introduced the concept of 'hegemony' which is the process by which a power relationship is accepted, consented to and seen as natural or 'common sense'. This links back to Marx's idea of Proletariats and Bourgeoisie. -
Claude Levi-Strauss - The Savage mind
Structuralist:
Binary Oppositions = Black/White, Man/Woman, Good/Bad.
Problems, for instance inequality. -
Stuart Hall - Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies
“Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.” -
Roland Barthes - Mythologies
Structuralist turned Post-structuralist:
Denotation and Connotation. Interrogate the falsely obvious. -
Laura Mulvey - Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.
She argued that mainstream Hollywood film was the product of a male-dominated and controlled industry. She argued that women are represented as passive objects of the male gaze and that pleasure in viewing come from voyeurism, narcissism and scopophilia. -
Edward Said - Orientalism
The West believe that they are superior to anyone else and the media contributes towards that belief. If it's different to their culture, it's wrong. They have a patronising attitude to other places -
Jacques Derrida - Writing and difference
Post-structuralist:
One meaning leads to many more meanings. -
Judith Butler - Post Feminism and Queer Theory
Gender is socially constructed and is reinforced by media and culture. Don't label yourself if you don't want to be controlled by society. Queer theory challenges the way in which heterosexuality is constructed as normal and suggests that sexual identity should be more fluid.
