Style is an unspoken language of identity. But what do things like clothes and hairdos mean? How should we interpret a mohawk as opposed to a beehive, pedalpushers versus intentionally ripped jeans, ska music versus hardcore? Dick Hebdige thinks he has the answer. Hebdige's slim 1979 monograph "Su

Clever, Cultural studies/new historicism, Eclectic, Pioneering, Political, Urban

When Jacques Lacan announced a "return to Freud" in the early 1950s, Sartre and Camus shuddered with existential angst inside the fortress they had built around the rational mind. Indeed, the emergence of Lacan, with his emphasis on unconscious desires, spelled the downfall of Existentialism, the phi

Clever, Death, Intense, Perverse, Phallic, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Sublime

"Nothing is worse," Nietzsche once said, "than the smell of an ill-constituted soul." For this professor of Classics and son of a Protestant minister, things were not hidden, there were no secrets: the world revealed itself. From this base of materialism and realism, Nietzsche assaulted Christianity,

Bombast, Clever, Discourse as event, Dramatic, Epic, Euphoric, Flux, Joyful, Melancholy, Overflowing, Philosophy, Poststructuralism, Profane, Surface, Witty

According to Jacques Derrida, structure -- the structure of language, for example -- occupies an impossible and ideal position: it at once posits an absolute center that holds everything together and a meta-perspective that also holds everything together. For Derrida, then, structure is defined by a

Clever, Deconstruction, Deconstructive, Improvised, Kinetic, Open-ended, Polychromatic, Post-colonialism, Sprawling