[CfSD Article 2021]: Thematic Criticism and Its Fundamental Forms
The following is a slightly edited and reformatted backup of my article for the Centre for Social Development blog in 2021. I cannot find an archive of the original. I wanted to preserve it but with better wording. The original essay also used a different referencing style; I have converted it to the Harvard style to be more consistent with my other essays for this blog. Additionally, I used Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) as one of my key examples. However, I overlooked that Renegade Cut - whose video I cited in my section on The Incredibles (Bird, 2004) - also briefly discussed the potential interpretations of Fight Club that I mentioned. In the interest of transparency and sufficient attribution, the feminist and Marxist readings of Fight Club I mentioned come from Renegade Cut. While I otherwise present my article as published in 2021, I would not attempt to fit the different types of thematic criticism into a finite number of categories if I discussed the topic today, as such a methodo...