Laurie Finke

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

This anthology of critical writing ranges from Gorgias and Plato to Sigmund Freud and Mikhail Bakhtin. Each of the 147 contributions has a headnote introducing the writer and making connections to other critics, theorists and movements. An introduction surveys the history of theory and criticism.

Discipline and Pleasure: The Pedagogical Work of Disneyland.

Abstract Disneyland is work disguised as play; school disguised as vacation. While Walt Disney’s curriculum deploys across all of its products, it literally engulfs the approximately 50 million ‘guests’ who visit the Disney Parks each year. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s phenomenological reading of orientation in Queer phenomenology, this article investigates the ways in which Disney’s didacticism is made material through practices and procedures designed to orient the park’s visitors, to ensure that those visitors always know where they are and who they are, as a means of educating ‘good’ citizens. The argument focuses not on Disneyland’s narrative curriculum but on its corporeal one: visitors are enticed to make affective investments, to construct or reconstruct their identities to comply with the Disney version of the ideal American worker and consumer, as the park attempts to reorient those who resist those roles.

Inner-City Chivalry in Gil Junger’s Black Knight: A South Central Yankee in King Leo’s Court

The desire to use the experience of the Middle Ages to relieve the 1 trauma of urban modernity provides the foundation for Black Knight’s use of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee formula.1 Though universally panned by critics, Gil Junger’s 2001 comedy offers an intriguing postcolonial fantasy that draws upon and transforms the very real oppression of urban modernity in inner-city communities like South Central LA by transporting the ghetto to the Eurocentric Middle Ages. At first glance, nothing could seem a less appropriate—and hence less realistic—setting for a time-travel movie about the Middle Ages than the inner-city ghetto. The first thing everybody notices (or perhaps does not even need to notice) about films set in the Middle Ages is that the characters are usually white. The fantasy of the Middle Ages has always been the exclusive province of European colonialism, representing the historical legitimation of white, Christian, European domination. A nonwhite character in such a landscape would surely seem “unrealistic” and need explaining.’ The real point of interest in Black Knight is to see how this unlikely melange of Martin Lawrence hip-hop comedy and medieval swashbuckling connects the twentieth-century urban black man with the “black knight” of chivalric fantasy and so realizes the pun in the title.

Fraternal Conspiracy and the Subject of Feminism

BBC news ran a story in July 2012 about a direct action feminist group in France that call themselves “La Barbe,” for the fake beards that they wear at protests to ridicule the pretensions of male supremacy as “corny” or “boring” (both idiomatic readings of “la barbe”). One of La Barbe’s protests targeted an event sponsored by the French Freemasons, the Grand Orient de France, which, from its foundation in 1733, historically excluded women from membership. As one protester remarked, referring to the apron that is the most conspicuous sign of masonry, “The women’s apron is but for domestic work. To men the task of working for the glory of the Great Architect of the universe!” (Ash). At work here in a protest aimed at an organization that attempts to stabilize sex difference through exclusionary practices (men are in, women out) is a gesture both rhetorical and material. The fake beards worn by members of the group point to the status of sex difference as prosthetic, a supplement that exposes the surface vagaries of what is considered a deep structure, a function of material bodies. The reference to the apron builds on that logic of substitution, moving metonymically from the beard as a failed sign of masculinity to the apron, itself an overdetermined and yet indeterminate sign that might point to the femininity of domestic work or to the work apron of the practicing (and presumably male) stonemason, which through another turn of the screw is no longer associated with physical labor (male or female), but metonymically with the virtues of the fraternal bond. A feminist protest in 2012 against an organization apparently as irrelevant today as the Freemasons—“a bunch of overgrown schoolboys rolling up their trouser-legs and engaging in verbal mumbo-jumbo” is the description given by one historian (Péter 134)—might seem, at first glance, trivial. Yet, the seriousness of this challenge might be measured by the cuts and bruises suffered by the protesters at the hands of the Freemasons, who forcibly ejected them from the event. Noted one protester, “Over the past

The Politics of the Canon: Christine de Pizan and the Fifteenth-Century Chaucerians

Abstract Although the French poet Christine de Pizan never set foot on English soil, her works were continually translated into English throughout the fifteenth century, often by the same writers who promoted Chaucer as the preeminent English poet. The work of creating Chaucer as a canonical poet intersects with translations of Christines works in three patronage networks: early in the century, in the Oxford circle of the future Henry V; at mid-century, in the provincial household of Sir John Fastolf; and finally in the patronage network that included Englands first printer, William Caxton, at the centurys end. The translations of these affinities form the nucleus of this essay, which joins theoretical speculation about literary canons with critiques of authorship, describing a complex nexus of connections between canon and politics, nationalism and patronage, French and English vernaculars, and literary authorship and gender that unpacks some of the ways in which literary canons, conceived as dynamic systems rather than static monuments, are formed and reformed.