Key Concepts in Cultural Theory

Rating:
Summary: Flawed but useful
Review: The idea is a great one: a handy dictionary of terms for the jargon-laden and often impenetrable vocabulary of cultural theory. Just what is the "Frankfurt School"? Can anyone please deconstruct "Deconstructionism"? What exactly is "punk" and do I need to understand "symbolic interactionism"?

Entries on these and other terms are helpful, and the book includes quite a few unexpected little essays on cinema, popular music, etc.

However, many of the entries fall victim to the same kind of jargoneering they purport to demystify; I must fault in particular the writing of one of the editors, Peter Sedgwick, whose entries are often obfuscatory or just plain badly written, e.g., in this description of "essentialism":

"Whether or not adoption of this view commits one to holding that these properties must exist in reality prior to the act of naming an object, so that a definition, if it is true is a priori true (see Lyotard's criticism of essentialism in "The Differend: Phrases in Dispute" (1988), Section 88) is perhaps an open question."

Whew! The editor needs an editor.

In all this is a helpful book (with a helpful index and bibliography as well), but sometimes suffers from the ills of its field.