engleski

The Syndrom of Aboutness as Caring about: Imagology vs. Thematology

In his essay "Thematics and Historical Evidence" (1993) Thomas Pavel uses the term political criticism to refer to the recent theoretical and research paradigms (primarily postcolonial criticism, gender studies and New Historicism) which appeared and developed as a result of an interest for contemporary political issues. It is not difficult to demonstrate that according to this criterion literary/comparative imagology may also be considered a variety of political criticism: its advocates have, after all, never concealed their supranational/Europhile starting points and goals. The legitimate political orientation of imagology brings about some of its limitations, for instance the disregard of the cognitive dimension of national images and the outright refusal to study their relationship towards the so-called historical/social reality. This paper starts off by analysing these "weak points" of imagology, going on to consider the sense of developing thematology as a universal research/methodological paradigm for all forms of criticism that Pavel calls political.

imagology, themathology, political criticism, cultural imagery

nije evidentirano