History, Literature, Critical Theory

History, Literature, Critical Theory PDF Author: Dominick LaCapra
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801467764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander's two-volume, prizewinning history Nazi Germany and the Jews. A recurrent motif of the book is the role of the sacred, its problematic status in sacrifice, its virulent manifestation in social and political violence (notably the Nazi genocide), its role or transformations in literature and art, and its multivalent expressions in "postsecular" hopes, anxieties, and quests. LaCapra concludes the volume with an essay on the place of violence in the thought of Slavoj Zizek. In LaCapra's view Zizek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence."

History, Literature, Critical Theory

History, Literature, Critical Theory PDF Author: Dominick LaCapra
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801467764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander's two-volume, prizewinning history Nazi Germany and the Jews. A recurrent motif of the book is the role of the sacred, its problematic status in sacrifice, its virulent manifestation in social and political violence (notably the Nazi genocide), its role or transformations in literature and art, and its multivalent expressions in "postsecular" hopes, anxieties, and quests. LaCapra concludes the volume with an essay on the place of violence in the thought of Slavoj Zizek. In LaCapra's view Zizek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence."

Soundings in Critical Theory

Soundings in Critical Theory PDF Author: Dominick LaCapra
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501705180
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In Soundings in Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his attempt to fashion a historiography that is at once critical and self-critical—a project he initiated in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (1983); and History and Criticism (1985), both available from Cornell University Press. This new collection of essays offers a provocative assessment of the nature of historical understanding and the role of critical theory in historical understanding; of the practice of historical writing as a dialogic exchange both with the past and among professional historians and critics; and of the problem of how to read texts and documents in relation to processes of contextual understanding. A central concern of the volume is the interaction between Marxism, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism, and all of the essays demonstrate the complex ways in which this trio of critical theories continues to affect how historians frame their task. LaCapra first provides a general appraisal of the problems and possibilities of criticism as a genre that questions its own limits, and examines the roles of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Mikhail Bakhtin in the development of contemporary criticism. Subsequent chapters address such issues as the implications of psychoanalysis for the writing of history, the debate between Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier concerning the status of the symbolic dimension in history, and the problem of how best to read and make use of Marx's work. LaCapra concludes by exploring the larger project of forging viable links between history and critical theory and by evaluating the contributions of deconstruction and the new historicism to this project. Contemporary cultural and intellectual historians, literary theorists and critics, philosophers, and social scientists will welcome this book.

The Concept of Modernism

The Concept of Modernism PDF Author: Astradur Eysteinsson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721305
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
The term "modernism" is central to any discussion of twentieth-century literature and critical theory. Astradur Eysteinsson here maintains that the concept of modernism does not emerge directly from the literature it subsumes, but is in fact a product of critical practices relating to nontraditional literature. Intervening in these practices, and correlating them with modernist works and with modern literary theory, Eysteinsson undertakes a comprehensive reexamination of the idea of modernism. Eysteinsson critically explores various manifestations of modernism in a rich array of American, British, and European literature, criticism, and theory. He first examines many modernist paradigms, detecting in them a conflict between modernism's culturally subversive potential and its relatively conservative status as a formalist project. He then considers these paradigms as interpretations-and fabrications-of literary history. Seen in this light, modernism both signals a historical change on the literary scene and implies the context of that change. Laden with the implications of tradition and modernity, modernism fills its major function: that of highlighting and defining the complex relations between history and postrealist literature. Eysteinsson focuses on the ways in which the concept of modernism directs our understanding of literature and literary history and influences our judgment of experimental and postrealist works in literature and art. He discusses in detail the relation of modernism to the key concepts postmodernism, the avant-garde, and realism. Enacting a crisis of subject and reference, modernism is not so much a form of discourse, he asserts, as its interruption-a possible "other" modernity that reveals critical aspects of our social and linguistic experience in Western culture. Comparatists, literary theorists, cultural historians, and others interested in twentieth-century literature and art will profit from this provocative book.

History and Its Limits

History and Its Limits PDF Author: Dominick LaCapra
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457688
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny). In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular," even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj Zizek. In a related vein, he discusses Martin Heidegger's evocative, if not enchanting, understanding of "The Origin of the Work of Art." LaCapra subjects to critical scrutiny the sometimes internally divided way in which violence has been valorized in sacrificial, regenerative, or redemptive terms by a series of important modern intellectuals on both the far right and the far left, including Georges Sorel, the early Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, and Ernst Jünger. Violence and victimization are prominent in the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra questions prevalent anthropocentrism (evident even in theorists of the "posthuman") and the long-standing quest for a decisive criterion separating or dividing the human from the animal. LaCapra regards this attempt to fix the difference as misguided and potentially dangerous because it renders insufficiently problematic the manner in which humans treat other animals and interact with the environment. In raising the issue of desirable transformations in modernity, History and Its Limits examines the legitimacy of normative limits necessary for life in common and explores the disconcerting role of transgressive initiatives beyond limits (including limits blocking the recognition that humans are themselves animals).

History in Transit

History in Transit PDF Author: Dominick LaCapra
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150172746X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
History in Transit comprises Dominick LaCapra's explorations of relationships he believes have been insufficiently theorized: between experience and identity, between history and various theories of subjectivity, between extreme events and their representation, between institutional structures and the kinds of knowledge produced within them. Taken together, these discussions form a dialogical encounter, positing the links among epistemological questions, historicist ones, and issues pertaining to disciplinary and institutional politics. Reacting against the antitheoretical bias of some prominent historians, LaCapra presents an alternative model of historiographical practice—one in which emphases on plurality and hybridity are combined with the concept of historical experience. For LaCapra experience emerges as a category both theoretically determined and anchored in the facticity of the everyday. LaCapra tests the assumptions and implications of the way one approaches the past by looking to psychoanalysis to render more self-aware the relationship between the historian and his or her material. He offers criticisms of assumptions held by practicing historians and theorists, placing the study of history at the center of a larger argument about the role of the contemporary university. Contesting both corporatization and claims that the university is in ruins, LaCapra writes, "It is paradoxical that the demand to make the university conform to an ever-increasing extent to a market or business model seems oblivious to the fact that the American university has probably been the most successful of its type in the world, that students from other countries disproportionately desire to study in it."

Critical Theory

Critical Theory PDF Author: Stephen Eric Bronner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190692677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Preface -- Introduction: what is critical theory? -- The frankfurt school -- A matter of method -- Critical theory and modernism -- Alienation and reification -- Enlightened illusions -- The utopian laboratory -- The happy consciousness -- The great refusal -- From resignation to renewal -- Unfinished tasks -- Further reading -- Index

Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature

Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature PDF Author: J.P. Sullivan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004329269
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
In recent decades the study of literature in Europe and the Americas has been profoundly influenced by modern critical theory in its various forms, whether Structuralism or Deconstructionism, Hermeneutics, Reader-Response Theory or Rezeptionsästhetik, Semiotics or Narratology, Marxist, feminist, neo-historical, psychoanalytical or other perspectives. Whilst the value and validity of such approaches to literature is still a matter of some dispute, not least among classical scholars, they have had a substantial impact on the study both of classical literatures and of the mentalité of Greece and Rome. In an attempt to clarify issues in the debate, the eleven contributors to this volume were asked to produce a representative collection of essays to illustrate the applicability of some of the new approaches to Greek and Latin authors or literary forms and problems. The scope of the volume was deliberately limited to literary investigation, broadly construed, of Greek and Roman authors. Broader areas of the history and culture of the ancient world impinge in the essays, but are not their central focus. The volume also contains a separate bibliography, offering for the first time a complete bibliography of classical studies which incorporate modern critical theory.

How to Interpret Literature

How to Interpret Literature PDF Author: Robert Dale Parker
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780190855697
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
"Distinguished in the market by its ability to mesh accessibility and intellectual rigor, How to Interpret Literature offers a current, concise, and broad historicist survey of contemporary thinking in critical theory. Ideal for upper-level undergraduate courses in literary and critical theory, this is the only book of its kind that thoroughly merges literary studies with cultural studies, including film. Robert Dale Parker provides a critical look at the major movements in literary studies since the 1930s, including those often omitted from other texts. He includes chapters on New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Queer Studies, Marxism, Historicism and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial and Race Studies, and Reader Response. Parker weaves connections among chapters, showing how these different ways of thinking respond to and build upon each other. Through these exchanges, he prepares students to join contemporary dialogues in literary and cultural studies. The text is enhanced by charts, text boxes that address frequently asked questions, photos, and a bibliography"--

A History of Literary Criticism

A History of Literary Criticism PDF Author: M. A. R. Habib
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405148845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 848

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Book Description
This comprehensive guide to the history of literary criticism from antiquity to the present day provides an authoritative overview of the major movements, figures, and texts of literary criticism, as well as surveying their cultural, historical, and philosophical contexts. Supplies the cultural, historical and philosophical background to the literary criticism of each era Enables students to see the development of literary criticism in context Organised chronologically, from classical literary criticism through to deconstruction Considers a wide range of thinkers and events from the French Revolution to Freud’s views on civilization Can be used alongside any anthology of literary criticism or as a coherent stand-alone introduction

The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning

The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning PDF Author: Scott Alan Metzger
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119100739
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
A comprehensive review of the research literature on history education with contributions from international experts The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning draws on contributions from an international panel of experts. Their writings explore the growth the field has experienced in the past three decades and offer observations on challenges and opportunities for the future. The contributors represent a wide range of pioneering, established, and promising new scholars with diverse perspectives on history education. Comprehensive in scope, the contributions cover major themes and issues in history education including: policy, research, and societal contexts; conceptual constructs of history education; ideologies, identities, and group experiences in history education; practices and learning; historical literacies: texts, media, and social spaces; and consensus and dissent. This vital resource: Contains original writings by more than 40 scholars from seven countries Identifies major themes and issues shaping history education today Highlights history education as a distinct field of scholarly inquiry and academic practice Presents an authoritative survey of where the field has been and offers a view of what the future may hold Written for scholars and students of education as well as history teachers with an interest in the current issues in their field, The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning is a comprehensive handbook that explores the increasingly global field of history education as it has evolved to the present day.