Summary

`Richard Osborne has done something very special here. He takes us on an exciting journey into the knowledge required to exist, survive, thrive, in the new millennium, in an interconnected global space that includes cyberpunk and cyborg, chaos theory and conspiracy theories, the postcolonial and the diaspora, hybridity and whiteness, the postmodern and the post-feminist, the digital and the Net, as much as older yet still influential terms like Enlightenment, empiricism, positivism, aesthetics, agency, nationhood and citizenship.

Osborne writes with wit, wisdom, and insight, always wary of any approach becoming an orthodoxy. He shows how particular concepts arise at particular times with particular authors and intellectual personalities. The entries proceed by illuminating examples, engaging anecdotes, subtle cross-referencing, wide historical contexts′ - John Docker, author of Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History

Written by the author of the international bestseller Philosophy for Beginners , Megawords provides definitions for the key terms every student in the humanities and social sciences needs to know.

Choice Review

Shedding British light on intellectual trends in the humanities and social sciences over the past 30 years, this book defines terms such as "abject/abjection," "deconstruction," "hyperreality," "identity politics," and "postmodernism." Each word or term is defined in one sentence, then discussed in additional text that can run to several pages, depending on the term's importance. The usual suspects are referred to repeatedly--Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Kristeva, Saussaure--while older seminal figures like Marx and Freud are invoked as necessary. The audience for this book is unclear. It would have been wonderful to find it written for readers who know nothing whatever about these terms, and some of the definitions are easy to comprehend; others would mystify those not already initiate in the language of modern philosophical, political, and literary-critical discourse. If told that "formalism" is a "theory of form in which form tends to be elevated over control," do you really understand the term? Still, the book could help some readers (though not necessarily undergraduates) make sense of the abstract linguistic swamp that constitutes current fashionable academic terminology. W. Miller Florida Atlantic University