aesthetic distance
1. In literary and aesthetic theory, a psychological relationship between an audience and an artwork reflecting a certain degree of disinterest, or critical detachment from it. Some critics ...
film theory
The aesthetic, historical, and/or ideological analysis of film, or the academic study of the nature of the cinematic experience, as distinguished from film criticism, which is typically concerned ...
foregrounding
[loose rendering of Czech aktualisace ‘actualization’]1. For the Prague school linguists this referred to a stylistic feature characterizing poetic language (and literary language in general), in ...
form
1. The shape, outline, or overall structure of an object or figure.2. (as in ‘form and content’) The structure, and sometimes also the style, of an utterance, text, or artwork in any medium as ...
formal analysis
A mode of analysis focusing primarily on the identification and description of the formal features (see also form) of a text or artwork and on their relations—rather than on its explicit content, or ...
historicism
[Th]A general and increasingly ambiguous term meaning a number of different things to different people. At its heart, however, is the idea that a society and its culture exist mainly in their dynamic ...
intrinsic meaning
1. The meaning of something in and of itself. In relation to the meaning of texts, this notion is encountered within formalism, where it is presumed possible to separate a text from its context and ...
media theory
1. Broadly, any coherent framework of ideas and concepts for analysing or generating investigable hypotheses about mediated communication, including media comparisons and theories of influence and ...
metalanguage
Language used to describe or analyse language. Linguistics can be seen as a metalanguage (a ‘second-order’ language) for describing natural language. Barthes, following Hjelmslev, saw myth as a ...
neoformalist film theory
An approach to the aesthetic analysis of film based on the work of the Russian formalists and associated with Kristin Thompson (b.1950), an American film theorist. Neoformalism rejects models of art ...
reductionism
[Th]The general principle that complicated phenomena can be explained by conceptually reducing them to a set of simple variables. This is often linked to essentialist or socio‐biological approaches.
text
The actual wording of a written work, as distinct from a reader's (or theatrical director's) interpretation of its story, theme, subtext, etc.; or a specific work chosen as the object of analysis. ...
textual analysis
In media, film, and cultural studies, the academic study of texts in any medium, using methods such as structuralist semiotic analysis, content analysis, or discourse analysis. Purely formalist ...
textual features
Distinctive formal (particularly stylistic and structural) aspects of an utterance, text, or artwork in any medium. The focal concern of textual analysis (especially within formalism). See also form; ...
