How Not to Write for Dissent

The following study (that is, etude) was originally submitted under the title “Strategies of Subversion: Discourse, Desire, and The Other in ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ “—Ens.

The hegemonic discourse of postmodernity valorizes modes of expressive and “aesthetic” praxis which preclude any dialogic articulation (in, of course, the Bakhtinian sense) of the antinomies of consumer capitalism.’ But some emergent forms of discourse inscribed in popular fictions contain, as a constitutive element, metanarratives wherein the characteristic tropes of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently affirmed. A paradigmatic text in this regard is the television series “Gill...