Foucault and structuralism

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com
Interviewer: Structuralism was not born recently. It was around at the beginning of the century. Yet it is only today that people have started talking about it. For the general public you are the priest of ‘structuralism’. Why?
Foucault: At the very most I am the altar boy of structuralism. Let’s say [...]

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Textual Poachers

Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
My rating: ****
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins
This is the seminal foundational text in terms of academic studies of fandom. Even if it was published in 1992 before the explosion of internet fandom and a more mainstream (even [...]

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Equilibrium (2002)

My rating: ***
Imdb link
This film is a collection of science fiction clichés. The style is pure Matrix and the writers have gone the whole hog and recognised the long black coats of the heroes of The Matrix as priestly soutanes, calling their wearers Clerics. It is the job of the Clerics – Fahrenheit 451 [...]

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Primer (2004)

My rating: *
Imdb link
It is very hard to know what this low budget science fiction film is actually about. It involves two engineers who develop a backyard time travel device in their spare time. Through using the machine their time travelling doubles develop a life of their own (I think!) and something, but it is [...]

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Theorizing fandom

Cheryl Harris, Alison Alexander (eds). Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1998.
My rating:***
Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity by Cheryl Harris
This is a rather useful edited collection about various media fandoms and fan practices. There is the usual stuff on slash included. Of course the book’s appearance in 1998 [...]

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A Sound of Thunder (2005)

My rating: ***
Imdb link
This is an entertaining time travel thriller where a butterfly accidentally trodden on by a time traveller in prehistoric times leads to catastrophic results for the present. It is a race against time, re-evolution, monstrous plants and dinosaur-like animals for our scientist heroes to get back to the past and undo [...]

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Looking Awry

Slavoj Zizek. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.
My rating: ***
Zizek paraphrases and inverts de Quincey’s famous propositions concerning murder:
If a person renounces Stephen King, soon Hitchcock himself will appear to him dubious, and from here it is just a step to a disdain for [...]

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Supernatural (TV series)

My rating: ***
Season 4 episode 7: ‘It’s the great pumpkin, Sam Winchester’
Well, while I am on a roll, I thought I might as well continue with this discussion of God, angels and demons and the supernatural and so on and so forth. Perhaps a more lengthy piece on the emergence of a neo-gnostic themes in [...]

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Apparitions (2008) Episode 2

My rating: ***
Spoiler alert
My post on episode one
Episode 2 of Apparitions is perhaps a little less convincing than the first one but what is interesting about it is how it manages to foreground contemporary cultural clichés about good and evil. There are some fairly absurd plot twists concerning the Chief Exorcist of Rome who is [...]

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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

My rating: ****
Imdb link
Recently I had an interesting discussion with a couple of friends about the complete disappearance of the twentieth century futurist vision, a vision which perhaps reached its culmination in the 1980s. 2001 is a reminder of that vision. The camera lingers languorously over the beautifully designed sets and models. The story and [...]

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