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The metaphysical poets display various modes of self-awareness, which may, however, be distributed around two poles: the ‘self-consciousness’ of John Donne and George Herbert, and the self-reflexivity of Thomas Traherne, foreshadowed by some lines of Andrew Marvell and the philosophy of Edward Herbert. Two principles of Stoicism have apparently affected Donne: the call to ‘live within oneself’ and the recognition that self-knowledge is the hardest achievement. The elegies were among Donne's earliest poems: inwardness and self-consciousness, though they early appeared in his verse letters, mainly flourished in later works. At the turn of the century there were undoubtedly in England social and literary influences that could account for the self-assertiveness displayed by Donne in his satires and in Metempsychosis, but not for the persistent egocentricity detected in all his writings. The attention to the reflexive operations of the mind displayed in the writings of Edward Herbert and Traherne has proved different from the self-consciousness of Donne and George Herbert. Cartesian dualism was bound to lead either to the immaterialism of George Berkeley, anticipated by Traherne, or to a materialism divorced from all spirituality.

This chapter is concerned with the nature of Andrew Marvell's self-awareness, his elusiveness, and his self-reflexivity. Marvell's elusiveness is acknowledged. What the poems disclose or suggest about his opinions and experiences is not only controversial: they leave out some essential aspects of the man's personality and inner life. The very portrait we have of the man is mute. Any attempt to define the nature of his self-awareness seems bound to be defeated. The first step in this inquiry must be the recognition of his unique ability to be dispassionate in his views on contemporary events. Several poems are tinged with irony, and irony requires a capacity for critical detachment. Serious expression of passionate love only occurs in two poems which, on close examination, confirm rather than contradict this impression of dispassionateness. There is, however, in Marvell a capacity for self-reflexivity, but his introspectiveness is of a different nature. Marvell's awareness of his thinking mind may prove a key to the mystery of his personality and account for the seeming contradictions and the elusiveness of his poetry.

A combined survey of Edward Herbert's prose works and his rather slender corpus of poetry sheds some light on the emergence of his mode of self-reflexivity. Herbert found it absurd to assume that there are only five modes of apprehension because we have five sense-organs. Because of his exclusive attention to the ‘inner sense’, Herbert multiplied the modes of apprehension; his discovery of subjectivity made him keenly aware of the particularity of each representation. With Thomas Traherne we move from egocentricity to a kind of solipsistic illusion, at least in his record of the alleged intuitions of his infancy. Traherne's evocation of his dreams in childhood is in accordance with the conclusions reached by Jean Piaget. The spontaneous solipsism of the infant, acknowledged by modern psychology, is linked to the poet's moments of solipsistic meditation. Had Traherne been capable of self-criticism, he might not have indulged in an exaltation of self-love. This self-centredness is characteristic of his conception of love as originating in self-love both in man and in God.

Based on similarities in Mikhail Bakhtin's and Carl Gustav Jung's ideas about dialogism, this chapter discusses the inclusion of sequences featuring heterogenic audio-visual media of conspicuously lower quality – the shooting of a film, TV reportage, a home video – in representative selection of films by veteran Romanian directors Mircea Daneliuc and Lucian Pintilie, as well as in films by Corneliu Porumboiu and Gabriel Achim from the New Romanian Cinema generation. The chapter then argues that the resultant intermedial carnivalesque, or trickster narrative, is facilitated by a Trickster figure, usually a director's stand-in of ambiguous cultural, ideological and ethical repute. This self-reflexive and meta-médiatique versatility of Trickster narratives, the chapter concludes, have proven time and again to be superb vehicles for cinematic encoding, which explains the fascination of Romanian film auteurs with tricksterish re-enactments and intermedial carnivalesque.

This chapter focuses on Noah’s Arc (Logo, 2005-2006) a television show featuring four gay men of color that aired for two seasons on the gay lifestyle-oriented cable channel Logo. It argues that Noah's Arc works within the popular cultural genre of the dramedy to engage with—while also contradicting and disrupting—new normativities of race, sexuality and its intersections. First it contextualizes the anxieties around black middle class heteronormativity and outlines some of the ways in which these anxieties have been negotiated through black televisuality. Then it provides an interpretation of Noah’s Arc from a queer of color perspective to understand its problematic framing of race, sexuality and its intersections as mostly an intra-racial problem of gay black masculinities and femininities. Given that the program has been criticized for foregrounding its characters’ negotiation of gender and sexuality at the expense of their race, it theorizes the program’s use of media self-reflexivity—in other words, its own representations of the television and film industry—to complicate its message about the roles of race and sexuality in the culture industry. Finally, it examines digital reception of the program to understand the way differently positioned audiences—primarily queer men of color—derived pleasure from the program’s campy aesthetics and melodramatic excess.

This chapter challenges the general, reductive assumption that graphic novelist Seth’s work is dominated by a nostalgic impulse. Offering a close reading of It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, the chapter demonstrates that though the protagonist/narrator is deeply nostalgic, the narrative itself critiques and undermines this version of “Seth”; Seth the graphic novelist critiques the overly nostalgic impulses of this eponymic persona in the graphic novel.

This chapter discusses Winterson's third novel, The Passion. The Passion may be said to combine the parallel stories of two marginal witnesses to the Napoleonic wars, at the crucial moment in Hegelian World History when it was approaching its apocalyptic synthesis. One is Henri, a French soldier who joined the Grande armée because he wanted to be a drummer and ended up as chicken-neck wringer and personal cook to Napoleon. The other is Villanelle, a Venetian boatman's daughter who worked at the casino as a croupier until she was sold by her husband as a vivandière, or army prostitute. The combination of history with fantasy aligns The Passion with ‘historiographic metafiction’, the type of novel characterised by intense self-reflexivity and a relish in storytelling which Linda Hutcheon considers to be the best expression of the contradictory nature of the postmodernist ethos.

This chapter presents a renewed vision for the true value of sociology as a discipline, distinct from the sacred project of American sociology. The chapter argues against the reaction that some outsiders might have of simply shutting down sociology as a discipline and claims that sociology makes a unique and crucial contribution to human knowledge and society, if it is properly understood and practiced. Social science’s greatest contribution to the societies that sustain it with resources is simply reporting back to those societies what really is going on in and among them, why and how so, and with what apparent consequences. Societal self-reflexivity and public self-understanding through truthful description and causal analysis are crucial in this approach.

It was almost certainly Ovid who joined together the narratives of frustrated desire of Echo (in love with Narcissus) and Narcissus (in love with his own mirror image). This he did by exploiting the Latin word imago, which defines both the visual reflection and the acoustic one. The illusion produced by the reflection is the central theme in Ovid’s story, and it is also the principle on which the two stories are closely intertwined, replicating the theme of reflection in both structure and language, and offering a reading of reality as a space dominated by ambiguities and deceptions. Narcissus’ ‘tragicomedy of errors’ implies at the same time a discourse on the fictitious nature of all literary texts, but his figure is also an emblem of the poet bent over in admiration of his own virtuosity, and in particular of Ovid himself, who was said by Quintilian to have been ‘too in love with his own brilliance’.

Very little is known about Nat Turner, the leader of the most famous slave revolt in American history. As Burnett’s experimental film shows, however, Turner was, in life, the property of slave owners, and after death, he became the property of various interpreters of his actions. Many whites have viewed him as an insane monster, and many blacks have regarded him as a revolutionary hero. He is the subject of oratory, literature, drama, film, and scores of historical writings. Burnett’s film seizes on these many representations and shows what they reveal about American history and society. It consists of interviews with a wide range of blacks and whites, plus a series of dramatic scenes based on writings about Turner, in which six different actors play him. Burnett has given us a meta-interpretation and the best way of understanding the Turner revolt.

In the late 1950s Saul Bass almost single-handedly initiated a Renaissance in the design of film credits. His titles for That’s Entertainment II summarize many of the techniques of traditional movie titles, which were inherently self-reflexive. In classical Hollywood, titles were kept to a minimum—used to identify the studio rather than an individual film. In Bass on Titles, the designer talks not so much about his theory of film titling; rather, that film is more of an advertisement for his titles. Bass’s title designs were based on a grid structure with strong horizontal and vertical symmetry and sans serif typefaces for legibility. His titles for Psycho, Goodfellas, Bonjour Tristesse, and other films were composed graphically in two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional space, even when the titles were animated.

Departing from Giorgio Agamben’s “The End of the Poem,” the introduction distinguishes “inception” from a series of related but not synonymous terms: origin, birth, and beginning. Recalling what R. Murray Schafer calls “onset distortion” in music, inception marks the text’s (and the life’s) vexed relation to its outside; inception, for this book, marks an asynchronicity within beginnings, textual and existential, where foundation diverges from mere starting out. The literary work, because it can neither comprise its inception nor externalize it in an authorizing exteriority, must in some sense posit itself. This fundamental, non-trivial self-reflexivity the book links to potentiality and to a striving for literary language to communicate itself, beyond any particular content of communication. In brief discussions of texts by Agamben, Arendt, Augustine, Benveniste, Frank Kermode, Roland Barthes, J Hillis Miller, Nabokov, and others, the introduction attempts to spell out its understanding of the relation of potentiality to inception and to trace some of its consequences for understandings of the relation between art and life. In so doing, it also distinguishes the book’s project from other possible approaches (empirical, practical, narratological) to the question of beginning.

This first part of the monograph introduces Umberto Eco's concept of the opera apertaand links it to the workings of comics as explained through the comics theories of Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen, and Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle. The potential for openness in comics is seen as being literalized by the disjointedness and gaps, which are essential to the very form of comics. Specific aspects harbouring the potential for openness are located in various formal and content-related features. The former include the manipulation of word-image relationships, page layouts, and visual styles whereas the latter focus on themes, characters, and references to other media and figuration. This part concludes with an overview of the comics analysed in Part Two.

This chapter summarizes the findings of the analyses conducted in Part Two and explains how openness unfolds in aspects regarding both form and content. The means of generating openness in comics are grouped under four broad categories based on ambiguity, suggestiveness, and subversion which are elaborated by beginning with the technical aspects of the medium, in particular its disjointed essence, and moving on to the media references, which often function self-reflexively. The relevance of characters subverting comics conventions is also highlighted. The section then discusses the role of subversive and self-reflexive themes such as autofiction and metafiction. The final section in this part connects comics' increasing indulgence in more allusiveconnections between panels and references to other media to the current prevalence of multimedia and the digital age in general.

Far from the founders of sports ministry’s original intentions, the encounter between evangelicalism and sports has resulted in a flexible evangelicalism that has allowed for a far wider range of beliefs and practices than the founders of sports ministry imagined. Engagement with sport provided another toolbox for evangelical female athletes, and when they actively sought to combine their athletic and evangelical identities, sport allowed them to develop a religious self-reflexivity that opened up a wide range of sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory understandings of what it means to be an evangelical woman in contemporary America. Sports ministry’s focus on witnessing, individual religious experience, and the discourses of spiritual warfare and Christlikeness can produce an intimate knowledge of what it means to be a Christian athlete. This intimate embodied knowledge has allowed female Christian athletes to engage and modify orthodoxy by redefining godly femininity, increasingly accepting lesbianism, and renegotiating marriage expectations. These unintended consequences show that religious engagement with popular culture can produce new religious tools that do the very real work of maintaining religious belief, but not always in ways that are predictable ahead of time.

This chapter brings Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology to bear on Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Un dimanche au cachot. One facet of Bourdieu’s thought that makes his work particularly productive and engaging for postcolonial studies is its focus on anamnesis, the critical work of recalling the repressed, historical dimension of a symbolic order taken for granted as natural.  What sets Bourdieu’s thinking apart from other theorizations of alienation and demystification is chiefly the importance it accords to embodiment, and to practice as a logic inseparable from the material space of social relations that habitus navigates. Bourdieu’s analysis of literature—and its capacity to do the work of anamnesis through irony—provides tools for a postcolonial literary criticism concerned that the field has misplaced its faith by focusing its energies on a form of self-reflexive literariness increasingly viewed less as critically subversive and more often as circular and self-enclosed.

Moving on to Arthur Symons poetry, chapter 4 argues that in Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895) the fragmented, impressionistic sensations and images of the city mirror the poet’s fragmented consciousness and state of mind. The city is a matrix of darkness and light that limits and specialises the art of gazing. Through their impressionistic lens, Symons’s speakers are flâneurs that perceive the phantasmagorias of London, or Paris, from new angles and perspectives. The city becomes a gigantic textual tangle of artificiality that invites deciphering. In this sense, the female figures populating it with their masks of make-up and dress are textual enigmas. The sexual encounter within private quarters, or the constellation of dancers in the music hall, becomes a mirror of the city exterior.

This book explores two central themes of Michel Foucault’s critical theory: power and ethics. It considers the ways that Foucault raises challenges and questions for his readers, questions that simultaneously cut in two directions—outward toward social structures and inward toward one’s own beliefs. This double-edged critique—both disconcerting and inspiring, of the social and individual, aimed outward and inward—is expressed in Foucault’s adage that “everything is dangerous.” Thus, Foucault gives us—or at least demands of us—a critical theory and, in particular, a critical ethics. This introduction argues that Foucault is a critical theorist and that his work is relevant for critical theory. It discusses Seyla Benhabib’s definition of critical theory, and particularly her characterization of critical-theoretical self-reflexivity and her assertion that the development of critical theory is “juxtaposed to instrumental reason.” It also describes three approaches for conceptualizing the relation between power and ethics in Foucault’s work. Finally, it provides an overview of the chapters in the book containing Foucault’s accounts of disciplinary power, biopower, and governmentality.