The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader

by Neil Badmington (Editor ), Julia Thomas (Editor)

Everything is open to question. Nothing is sacred.

Critical and cultural theory invites a rethinking of some of our most basic assumptions about who we are, how we behave, and how we interpret the world around us.

The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader brings together 29 key pieces from the last century and a half that have shaped the field. Topics include: subjectivity, language, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, the body, the human, class, culture, everyday life, literature, psychoanalysis, technology, power, and visuality. The choice of texts, together with the editors' introduction and glossary, will allow newcomers to begin from first principles, while the use of unabridged readings will also make the volume suitable for those undertaking more specialized work. Material is arranged chronologically, but the editors have suggested thematic pathways through the selections.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction, Read For School

464 pages, Hardcover

First published August 19, 2008

About the author

Neil Badmington is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Criticism and English Literature at Cardiff University.

Reviews

[Elisa]

This Routledge book is filled with a wide expanse of interesting and evocative essays. I wouldn't recommend it as light reading, but it has a great deal to offer. This collection definitely gets your mental muscles flexing. I can't say I would have read it if it hadn't been assigned reading for my theory class, but I'm glad I got/had to read it. It was a good experience and I learned a great deal.

My favourite essays are 'Panoticism' by Michel Foucault and 'How To Tame A Wild Tongue' by Gloria Anzaldua.

[Annah-Marie]

This book is very informative, but not something that I want to sit down and read through for fun. I'll use it again as an art historical resource, for sure.

[Caterina]

Some of my favorite were the readings by Gloria Anzaldúa and Roland Barthes. Definitely a must read for an insight into common themes and practices still occurring today.

[Amy]

This was my primary text for my course, which we read in conjunction with the Tyson text I mentioned in an above post. This Reader is essentially a collection of essays by great thinkers. The essays themselves were interesting, and it's always good to read primary sources. I think I would've been lost without the Tyson text to accompany this, however, because there is literally NO background info or commentary on any of the readings in this book. They give you no biography info about the author, no real context about how the essays were presented (they might mention a conference, but they don't give any info about that conference, etc.). This is particularly difficult because most of the readings are drawing on and responding to other works in the field--for example, the essay we read by Freud connects to work of other psychoanalysts and needs a historical context. None of this is provided in Routledge--not in an introduction, nor in annotations or footnotes. They have a "for additional reading" section, which is great, but it would really help to have had more context in the book itself. Maybe they expected the teacher would provide that in class, but generally we ended up doing the reading first so that we could discuss it in class, and I really wanted way more orientation to each thinker before I read the essay. Tyson doesn't really feel like a grad-level text, so I'm glad that we had all the primary sources here, but at least Tyson gave helpful contextual background, that provided some orientation for understanding the readings in this text.

I did really enjoy the different pieces they included, and hope to go through it more and more and connect it with other thinkers. Disclaimer: part of the issue here is that I was not an English major as an undergrad, so perhaps that would've given me a more relevant foundation. But I love theory, and read a lot of nonfiction related to the social sciences. But that's just it--there are essays that require more of a background in history, economics, psychology, linguistics, etc. Few people have studied ALL these fields in enough detail to have the relevant context, which is why I think I hoped for more annotations and context in the book itself. That's just my preference.