~ behaviour in order to survive. The term was devised by Ellen Moers, for whom ~ 18th-century Gothic novels were an example of "travelling heroinism".
Heteroglossia: Mikhail Bakhtin's term to describe the intertextual (q.v.) nature of novels. The novel is a very flexible and open form, capable of referring to a multitude of cultural discourses. Bakhtin saw this as subversive since it resisted the unifying (that is, conservative) forces operating within most cultures.
® Homology: Lucien Goldmann's work explores the way in which literary texts can express the world view of certain influential social groups contemporary with those texts. There is, in other words, a "homology" between text and group, with the
' former articulating the latter's beliefs more clearly than they can.
Hybridity: The concept of hybridity figures large in postcolonial theory. For Homi K. Bhabha, it represents a condition between states (somewhere between working-
class identity and gender, for example) whose virtue is that it escapes the control of either. As such, it has considerable subversive potential. -, Hyperreality: Jean Baudrillard's concept to describe the condition beyond meaning
that, for him, sums up postmodern life. A cultural phenomenon like Disneyland no longer means anything: it is neither the real thing nor a representation of the past. Rather, it is hyperreal - beyond meaning or analysis.
Ideological State Apparatus: Louis Althusser's term for all those institutions, such as the legal and educational systems, the arts and the media, which serve to transmit and reinforce the values of the dominant ideology. '
Imaginary: In Lacanian theory, the pre-self conscious state of young babies aged up to six months or so. Lacan identifies this state with the mother, and we leave it when we move into the symbolic (q.v.) realm of language and social existence at the age of around eighteen months.
Inhuman: For Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard, all those processes which conspire to marginalize the human dimension in our world. Examples would include the growth ~ of computerization, and particularly the development of sophisticated, and ~ eventually autonomous, systems of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life.
lnterpellation: The process by which ideology manipulates us to conform to its values. For Louis Althusser, it was a case of ideology "hailing" us, almost like a policeman calling us to attention. We respond to such signs in reflex fashion, thus revealing how successfully ideology has conditioned us. '
Interpretive community: For Stanley Fish, an interpretive community constitutes the body of scholars working in a critical discipline whose collective practices set the criteria for interpretation. These practices can change over time, and the community might be thought of as similar to Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm (q.v.).
lntertextuality: A term which describes the way in which all texts echo other texts, and are, as theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva have pointed out, ' "mosaics of quotations" and references from an extensive variety of sources.
Linguistic model: Ferdinand de Saussure's model of how language works - a system with its own internally consistent rules or grammar - was appropriated by 170
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