You think that drawing is gross? It could have been so much worse. The Abject, Literary Studies: Well, this one is notoriously difficult to explain, because Kristeva is a notoriously challenging writer. I would argue that she’s a tremendously good one though. When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and […]
Tag: critical theory
Pictures of Theories: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, Psychology: “This phenomenon occurs when the thing you’ve just noticed, experienced or been told about suddenly crops up constantly. It gives you the feeling that out of nowhere, pretty much everyone and their cousin are talking about the subject — or that it is swiftly surrounding you. And you’re not crazy; […]
Pictures of Theories: The Iceberg Theory
The Iceberg Theory, Literary Studies:
“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Pictures of Theories: The Specious Present
The Specious Present: Psychology/Neuroscience, specifically time perception.
You could file this one under philosophy too, but I mean everything is philosophy, really.
The term “specious time” originated with E. Robert Kelley (aka E. R. Clay) …
Pictures of Theories: Language Acquisition Device
Language Acquisition Device (LAD), Linguistics: First proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or “innate facility” for acquiring […]
Pictures of Theories: The Death of the Author
Well, that was an easy one.
Pictures of Theories: Representation
Representation, Cognitive Science: (Also referred to as mental representation or cognitive representation.) A representation is a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types of information, together with a specification of how the system does this. And I shall call the result of using a representation to describe a given entity […]
Pictures of Theories: Deconstruction
Deconstruction, literary studies: Deconstruction is a method of literary analysis with roots in the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida. According to Wikipedia, “This article has multiple issues.” Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. – J. Hillis Miller, “Stevens’ Rock […]
Pictures of Theories: Differentiation
Differentiation, education studies: “Differentiated instruction and assessment (also known as differentiated learning or, in education, simply, differentiation) is a framework or philosophy for effective teaching that involves providing different students with different avenues to learning (often in the same classroom) in terms of: acquiring content; processing, constructing, or making sense of ideas; and developing teaching […]
Send me your theories
Are you currently or have you ever pursued an advanced degree in any field? Please send me theoretical terms from your field so that I can draw pictures of them. I will post the pictures here for you to see.