ABSTRACT
Poststructuralism and psychoanalytic semiology have taught several generations to view literary and cinematic texts, not as works with distinctive traits expressing in some instances the intentions of creative agents, but as mere epiphenomena of language, desire, ideology and a unified, ‘logophallocentric’ Western metaphysics (Hjort 1993). However, over the past ten years or so, we have seen a dramatic shift from this sort of theory to what is beginning to look like a promising emphasis on the specificity of relevant cultural, social, and historical contexts in accounts of literature, film, and the other arts. More specifically, the influential critical vocabulary associated with deconstruction and psychoanalytic semiology must compete with a new set of terms: ‘hybridity’, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘transnationalism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘internationalism’, ‘globalisation’, ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘exile’, ‘postcolonialism’, to mention but some of the most salient terms. While the specific meaning of some of these terms-‘hybridity’ is a good example-is linked to poststructuralist premises, many of the terms bring into play concepts and approaches that are able to mediate successfully between macrosociological and agential levels of description. Any successful attempt, for example, to deal cogently with the nationalist dimensions of a given work is likely to involve some account of the historical specificity of a given nationalist context, as well as an exploration of the ways in which the artist’s focal beliefs about national identity, and self-deceptions linked to the psychologies of nationalism, find expression.
