Theorists and Critics

How Roland Barthes Gave Us the TV Recap

25 May 2012

What would the man who essentially created cultural criticism make of a world in which criticism has become a kind of pop culture?

In the Chloroformed Sanctuary

23 May 2012

Tim Parks Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos University scholars marching in Kiel, West Germany, 1965. “Walk around a university campus,� fumed Geoff Dyer in Out of Sheer Rage , “and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.� In my last piece in this space I suggested that writers are anxious to present literature as ...

Girls on film: how Tim Burton finally got his vamp right

18 May 2012

You can't really be an auteur until you've got your type – and that's just as true for the women directors Tim Burton's Dark Shadows may have received a kicking from critics, but one person has emerged from the dust-up unscathed: Eva Green, the French actress who plays the evil witch Angelique Bouchard. With her red-lacquered lips, her crazy-beautiful eyes and possessed-marionette limbs, Green's ...