Frankfurt School of Social Criticism:

• Max Horkheimer
• Theodor Adorno
• Friedrich Pollock
• Leo Loewenhtal
• Hannah Arendt
• Herbert Marcuse
• Franz Neumann
• Otto Kirchheimer
• Walter Benjamin
• Herbert Marcuse
• Georg Lukács

Second-Generation and Third-Generation Critical Social Theorists:

• Karl Otto Apel
• Jürgen Habermas
• Thomas McCarthy
• Seyla Benhabib
• Albrecht Wellmer
• Axel Honneth
• Martin Seel

Critical Theorists:

• Ferdinand de Saussur
• Claude Lévi-Strauss
• Louis Althusser
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• Valentin Voloshinov
• Paulo Freire
• Michel Foucault
• Jacques Derrida
• Gilles Deleuze
• Félix Guattari
• Ernesto Laclau
• Claude Lefort
• Jean-Francois Lyotard
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Julia Kristeva
• Luce Irigaray
• Hélène Cixous
• Judith Butler
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Bruno Latour
• Fredric Jameson
• Étienne Balibar
• Ernst Bloch
• Antonio Gramsci
• Roland Barthes
• Paul de Man
• J. Hillis Miller
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• Christopher Norris
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• Michael Hardt
• Chantal Mouffe
• Antonio Negri
• Homi Bhabha
• Frantz Fanon
• Edward Said

Schools of Thought within Critical Theory:

• Marxism
• Marxist theory
• Phenomenology:
  • Husserl
  • Merleau-Ponty
• Genealogy:
  • Nietzsche
  • Foucault
• Psychoanalytic Theory:
  • Sigmund Freud
  • Jacques Lacan
  • Julia Kristeva
  • Slavoj Žižek
  • Alenka Zupancic
• Hermeneutics
  • Martin Heidegger
  • Hans Georg Gadamer
  • Paul Ricoeur
  • Manfred Frank
  • Albrecht Wellmer
• Semiotics
• Structuralist
• Post-structuralism
• Cultural Studies
• Deconstruction
• Gender Studies
• Postcolonialism
• Postmodernism
• Queer theory
• Cultural anthropology

From Jennifer Einspahr:

• Arendt, Hannah. On the Human Condition. 1958.
• ——– . Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin, 1993.
• Barber, Benjamin. Strong Democracy. 1984.
• Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Ed. and Trans. by H.M. Parshely. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
• Brown, Wendy. States of Injury. Princeton: 1995.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1997.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• ——–. The Psychic Life of Power. 1997.
• Connell, Robert W. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
• Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review: 1241, 1991.
• Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. 1925.
• ——–. Freedom and Culture. 1939.
• Domosh, Mona and Joni Seager. Putting Women in Place. New York: The Guilford Press, 1991.
• Giddens, Anthony. The Giddens Reader. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish; History of Sexuality I and II; and others.
• Fraser, Nancy. Justice Interruptus. 1997.
• Harvey, David. Spaces of Capital. New York: Routledge, 2001.
• Hirschmann, Nancy. The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
• Hooks, Bell. From Margin to Center. 2000.
• Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy V. Creatures of Prometheus: Gender and the Politics of Technology. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.
• Keenan, Alan. Democracy in Question. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
• Lorber, Judith. Paradoxes of Gender. 1994.
• MacKinnon, Catharine. Various.
• MacPherson, C.B. Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1973.
• Marx, Karl. Manuscripts, “On the Jewish Question”, German Ideology especially.
• Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
• McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
• Moi, Toril. What is a Woman? 1999.
• Pettit, Phillip. 1997. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Claredon Press.
• ——–. 2001. A Theory of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Social Contract; The First and Second Discourses, especially.
• Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. 1985.
• Sewell, William H. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 98, Is. 1 (July, 1992) 1-29.
• Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory. New York: Verso, 1989.
• Stevens, Jacqueline. Reproducing the State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, 1963; On Certainty, 1979.
• Wolin, Sheldon. “Fugitive Democracy.” in Seyla Benhabib, ed. Democracy and Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, 31-45.
• ——–. Politics and Vision. 2006.
• Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press,1990.
• ——–. On Female Body Experience. Oxford: 2005.
• Zerilli, Linda. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: 2005.

From Greg Wright

First-String Texts:

• Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
• Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
• Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation; America
• Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text; S/Z; Mythologies; Camera Lucida; Elements of Semiology
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; The Order of Things
• Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image; Cinema 2: The Time-Image
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus; A Thousand Plateaus
• Janet Staiger, Media Reception Studies
• Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
• Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method; Orientalism
• Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; The Man without Content
• Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think
• Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine
• George Bluestone, Novels into Film
• David Bodanis, Web of Words: The Ideas Behind Politics
• Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
• Ross Chambers, Loiterature
• Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems
• Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
• Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene
• Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained
• Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation
• Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Interconnected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
• Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses; Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media
• Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Affect, Movement, Sensation
• Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation
• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
• J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines
• Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History

Second-String Texts:

• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
• Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!; Organs without Bodies
• Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
• M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
• Ken Knabb, ed., The Situationist International Anthology
• Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
• Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory
• Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice
• Frederic Jameson, Signatures of the Visible; Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
• Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural; The Sense of the World
• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Black Skin, White Masks
• Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures; Death at 24x a Second
• Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria; Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious; Civilization and Its Discontents
• Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
• Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective
• Judith Roof, Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative
• Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony
• Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera
• Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
• Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style
• Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment; The Culture Industry
• Julia Kristeva,

From Amelia Katanski

• Acoose, Janice et al. Reasoning Together: The Native Critics’ Collective. 2008.
• Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.
• Basso, Keith. Portraits of “the Whiteman”: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache.
• —–. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache.
• Bakhtin, MM. The Dialogic Imagination.
• —–. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
• Bell, Derrick, And We Are Not Saved.
• Clifford, James. “Traveling Culture.”
• Clifford, James, ed. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
• Cruikshank, Julie, The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. 1998.
• Crenshaw, Kimberle, et al. Critical Race Theory: Key Writings that Formed the Movement.
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth.
• Fletcher, Matthew LM. American Indian Education: Counternarratives in Racism, Struggle and the Law, 2008.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish.
• —–.The History of Sexuality.
• Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism.
• Gates, Henry Louis, ed. “Race” Writing and Difference.
• Jameson, Frederick. The Political Unconscious.
• Kroskrity, Paul. Language, History and Identity, U Arizona Press.
• Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
• Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.
• Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.
• Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism.
• —–. Orientalism.
• —–. “Preface to Orientalism” 2001.
• Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts.
• Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. London: Zed, 1999.
• Teuton, Sean. Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel. 2008.
• Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance.
• Volosinov, VN. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
• Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. 1991.
• Williams, Robert. he American Indian in Western Legal Thought: Discourses of Conquest.
• —–. Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1999.
• Womack, Craig. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. U Minnesota, 1999.
• Womack, Craig, Robert Allen Warrior and Jace Weaver, American Indian Literary Nationalism. 2006.
• Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions.
• —–. The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction.