Aaron Jaffe is Frances Cushing Ervin Professor of American Literature at FSU. He has published extensively on modern and contemporary literature and cultural theory, including Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, The Way Things Go: An Essay on the Matter of Second Modernism, and the forthcoming book Spoiler Alert: A Critical Guide.
Aaron Jaffe
Contributions
Responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory, Part I
I am a fan of “weak theory,” as Paul Saint-Amour has described the constellation of engagements and scholarly endeavors that he brings together in his introduction to the “Weak Theory” special issue of Modernism/modernity. I myself am agnostic about using the term “weak” to describe the disparate approaches that are gathered there under the banner of “weak theory,”
Introduction: Who’s Afraid of the Inhuman Woolf?
It runs like this: First, a film has to contain two female characters; second, they have to talk to one other; third: they have to talk about something besides a man.
Who today hasn’t heard of the Bechdel test? Having gone viral, it increasingly serves as a litmus test in class discussion for marking outsized gender bias in texts. The test provides a handy algorithm, generating a consistent output: a fundamental feminist insight that far too many texts do not contain women who talk about anything besides a man.