metacommentary Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
... American cultural critic Fredric Jameson ’s term for his comparative analysis of competing interpretive methods. Jameson says that the metacommentary implies a model not unlike Sigmund Freud ’s conception of the relationship between the symptom and its underpinning, but repressed idea (minus his theory of the libido , of course). The content of a text is the distorted product of lived experience subject to censorship—there are always certain ideas, thoughts, phrases, and so forth that are not appropriate in a particular historical context so...
metacommentary
Feminist Scholarship Reference library
Yvonne Sherwood
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible
...narratives, even though their behaviour is praised as exemplary. Bibliothèque Municipal, Besançon. If the Bible, as Phylis Bird puts it, is largely a ‘collection of writing by males from a society dominated by males’, then so too is commentary. Feminist meta-commentary (or commentary on commentary) shows how the scholarly tradition has often unthinkingly reinscribed biblical prejudices against women, and in some cases written gender inequalities larger than in the original text. The garden of Eden has, as Trevor Dennis puts it, been crammed...
transcoding
dialectical criticism
Fredric Jameson
transcoding Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...are in consequence. By the same token, this comparative viewpoint itself implies still another code that is itself ‘untranscendable’ to use Jameson’s famous description of Marxism from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act ( 1981 ). See also metacommentary...
metahistory Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...this has a significant influence on the range of meanings that can be given to a set of basic facts. Was the French Revolution inevitable? If so, why didn’t similar revolutions occur elsewhere? Was it a tragedy? If so, from whose perspective? Fredric Jameson ’s concept of metacommentary takes a similar approach to the analysis of critical theories...
dialectical criticism Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...given text by reconstructing the historical conditions—particularly the ideological conditions—that yielded it. Jameson’s life-work can be seen as an astonishingly long and diverse series of demonstrations of both the versatility and utility of this approach. See also metacommentary ; transcoding...
rhizome Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...their function (in other words, one doesn’t necessarily need to reject psychoanalysis outright, its insights can be used as starting points). Further Reading: K. Ansell Pearson Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (1999). I. Buchanan Deleuzism: A Metacommentary ...
Verbal Play Reference library
International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 ed.)
...and narrative manipulations, out of which verbal art is created. At the same time, there are various and overlapping ends served by speech play: comic or humorous, religious, rhetorical, mnemonic, competitive, and artistic. Speech play provides implicit and explicit metacommentary—in the form of the praxis of everyday life and artistic performance—on systems and structure, social, cultural, interactional, and (socio)linguistic. It explores and indeed flirts with the boundaries of the socially, culturally, and linguistically possible and appropriate;...
Jameson, Fredric (1934– ) Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...provides a provisional account of Jameson’s method. Reticent about allowing his work to be turned into something he disparagingly calls a ‘brand’, Jameson has held back from developing a singular method that could be easily emulated. His method, which he has variously called metacommentary , transcoding , and dialectical criticism , is, he insists, in a permanent state of incompletion. Allowing that his method is provisional and subject to change, one can nevertheless identify a number of its essential coordinates. Dialectical thinking, as Jameson defines it,...
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard Reference library
Oxford Reader’s Companion To Conrad
...Jameson ’s ambitious meta-commentary in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Methuen, 1981 ) has been particularly influential in its fusion of materialist and post-structural methodologies. Nostromo figures centrally in Jameson ’s attempt to devise a Marxist narrative grammar by which to approach the literary text in an age of high capitalism and in order to probe the text’s formal structures as symptoms of the containment and suppression of history by ideology. A second form of metacommentary, Edward Said’s ...
López, Alma Reference library
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States
...that in her view fill the Chicana and Chicano visual space. Living in a Chicana and Chicano neighborhood, López observed the overrepresentation of images of “Zapata, Aztec Warriors, and now César Chávez” (Lopez 2001 , p. 250). The defacement of the mural functions as a metacommentary on the relationship between gender, power, and representation. While the young men intended to discipline the four young women, in effect their actions demonstrate that the social space of the barrio is male-dominated and that such dominance is threatened by strong women....
Jong, Erica Reference library
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
...metaphysics of Anne Sexton. “When craft and the exploration of self come together, that's when you become a poet,” Jong said in a 1973 interview. In the wake of the huge success of Fear of Flying , Jong published Loveroot ( 1975 ), a collection that has humor, edge, and metacommentary on writing. In the poem She Leaps , Jong writes of the discomfort she feels in the role her literary success has placed her, a role that makes it difficult to separate self from public projections of self: “She is part herself, / part everyone.” While much of Jong's poetic...
Barrie, J. M. Reference library
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
...a book for children at all, but the question this throws back to us is whether there can be any such thing. Children's fiction is impossible … in that it hangs on an impossibility. … This is the impossible relation between adult and child.” She argues that Peter Pan is a metacommentary on the rubric of children's literature itself because it speaks from a position of adult text that has been extrapolated for children. It is the adult mother figure of Mrs. Darling who, in fact, initiates this trip into Neverland—it is the dream from her “romantic mind”...
Paul in Fiction
Oxford Encyclopedias of the Bible: Digital Collection
...of trying to save Christianity for the future, however, Timothy reflects upon how even his contemporary, official version of the events of Christ’s life differs from the reality, as he understands it. The novel thus becomes a metacommentary, of sorts, on the role of desire (ideological, financial, in the construction of our most important cultural narratives. As such, Live from Golgotha turns the Pastorals on their head. The “deposit” ( 2 Tim 1:14 ) which...
France Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales
...parodies. If the line between ‘serious’ and ‘parodic’ fairy tales is not always clear because some writers, notably Mlle de Lubert, delight in exaggerating the already hyperbolic features of the genre, several writers nevertheless state an unequivocal parodic intent through meta-commentaries on the stories made by storyteller and listeners (e.g. Crébillon's ‘Ah quel conte!’ and Rousseau's ‘La Reine Fantasque’). That nearly one-third of all 18th-century fairy tales employ parody demonstrates the genre's significant contribution to the increasingly self-reflexive...
France, fairy tales in ((17th century to present)) Reference library
Lewis C. Seifert
The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (2 ed.)
...parodies. If the line between ‘serious’ and ‘parodic’ fairy tales is not always clear because some writers, notably Mlle de Lubert, delight in exaggerating the already hyperbolic features of the genre, several writers nevertheless state an unequivocal parodic intent through meta-commentaries on the stories made by storyteller and listeners (e.g. Crébillon’s ‘Ah quel conte!’ and Rousseau’s ‘La Reine Fantasque’). That nearly one-third of all 18th-century fairy tales employ parody demonstrates the genre’s significant contribution to the increasingly self-reflexive...
Risky Truth-Making in Qualitative Inquiry Reference library
Aaron M. Kuntz
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods in Education
...Information Age. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braiddoti, R. (2013). The posthuman . Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press Buchanan, I. (2000). Deleuzism: A metacommentary . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995). Difference and repetition ( P. Patton , Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. , & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizoph renia. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press...
