The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism

The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism PDF Author: H. Aram Veeser
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785274384
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
The interviewees of this volume fall into three groups: the main players who brought about the rise of theory (Fish, Gallop, Spivak, Bhabha); a younger group of post-theorists (Bérubé, Dimock, Nealon, Warren); the anti-critique theorists (Felski); and new order theorists (Puchner, Wolfe). They discuss elemental questions, such as trying to grasp what was logic and what was rhetoric; trying to see down the road while fog and turmoil held visibility to arm’s length; and trying to pick legible meanings out of the cultural blanket of deafening noise. Theorists were not only good thinkers but also pioneers who were seeking profound transformations.

The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism

The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism PDF Author: H. Aram Veeser
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785274384
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
The interviewees of this volume fall into three groups: the main players who brought about the rise of theory (Fish, Gallop, Spivak, Bhabha); a younger group of post-theorists (Bérubé, Dimock, Nealon, Warren); the anti-critique theorists (Felski); and new order theorists (Puchner, Wolfe). They discuss elemental questions, such as trying to grasp what was logic and what was rhetoric; trying to see down the road while fog and turmoil held visibility to arm’s length; and trying to pick legible meanings out of the cultural blanket of deafening noise. Theorists were not only good thinkers but also pioneers who were seeking profound transformations.

Edward Said

Edward Said PDF Author: H. Aram Veeser
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136932577
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book Here

Book Description
This insightful critical biography shows us an Edward Said we did not know. H. Aram Veeser brings forth not the Said of tabloid culture, or Said the remote philosopher, but the actual man, embedded in the politics of the Middle East but soaked in the values of the West and struggling to advance the best European ideas. Veeser shows the organic ties connecting his life, politics, and criticism. Drawing on what he learned over 35 years as Said's student and skeptical admirer, Veeser uses never-before-published interviews, debate transcripts, and photographs to discover a Said who had few inhibitions and loathed conventional routine. He stood for originality, loved unique ideas, wore marvelous clothes, and fought with molten fury. For twenty years he embraced and rejected, at the same time, not only the West, but also literary theory and the PLO. At last, his disgust with business-as-usual politics and criticism marooned him on the sidelines of both. The candid tale of Said's rise from elite academic precincts to the world stage transforms not only our understanding of Said—the man and the myth—but also our perception of how intellectuals can make their way in the world.

Rebirth and Renewal

Rebirth and Renewal PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791098052
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
Provides an examination of the use of rebirth and renewal in classic literary works.

Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History

Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History PDF Author: Jay Clayton
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299130343
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection explores and clarifies two of the most contested ideas in literary theory - influence and intertextuality. The study of influence tends to centre on major authors and canonical works, identifying prior documents as sources or contexts for a given author. Intertextuality, on the other hand, is a concept unconcerned with authors as individuals; it treats all texts as part of a network of discourse that includes culture, history and social practices as well as other literary works. In thirteen essays drawing on the entire spectrum of English and American literary history, this volume considers the relationship between these two terms across the whole range of their usage.

Anatomy of Criticism

Anatomy of Criticism PDF Author: Northrop Frye
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780141187099
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description


A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism

A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism PDF Author: Evgeny Dobrenko
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822977443
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book Here

Book Description
This edited volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travelers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the cultural revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with official ideology. The chapters follow theory and criticism into the 1930s with examinations of the Union of Soviet Writers, semantic paleontology, and socialist realism under Stalin. A more "humanized" literary criticism appeared during the ravaging years of World War II, only to be supplanted by a return to the party line, Soviet heroism, and anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period. During Khrushchev's Thaw, there was a remarkable rise in liberal literature and criticism, that was later refuted in the nationalist movement of the "long" 1970s. The same decade saw, on the other hand, the rise to prominence of semiotics and structuralism. Postmodernism and a strong revival of academic literary studies have shared the stage since the start of the post-Soviet era. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in emigre literary theory and criticism.

After the New Criticism

After the New Criticism PDF Author: Frank Lentricchia
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226471983
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Get Book Here

Book Description
This work is the first history and evaluation of contemporary American critical theory within its European philosophical contexts. In the first part, Frank Lentricchia analyzes the impact on our critical thought of Frye, Stevens, Kermode, Sartre, Poulet, Heidegger, Sussure, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault, among other, less central figures. In a second part, Lentricchia turns to four exemplary theorists on the American scene—Murray Krieger, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom—and an analysis of their careers within the lineage established in part one. Lentricchia's critical intention is in evidence in his sustained attack on the more or less hidden formalist premises inherited from the New Critical fathers. Even in the name of historical consciousness, he contends, contemporary theorists have often cut literature off from social and temporal processes. By so doing he believes that they have deprived literature of its relevant values and turned the teaching of both literature and theory into a rarefied activity. All along the way, with the help of such diverse thinkers as Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Bloom, Lentricchia indicates a strategy by which future critical theorists may resist the mandarin attitudes of their fathers.

Thinking Across the American Grain

Thinking Across the American Grain PDF Author: Giles Gunn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226310770
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Thinking Across the American Grain Giles Gunn makes a major contribution to the current revival of pragmatism in America by showing how it provides the most critically resilient and constructive response to the intellectual challenges of postmodernism. Gunn reclaims and refurbishes elements of the pragmatic tradition that either have been lost or have undergone important changes and shows how newer critical approaches have strong roots in the pragmatic tradition. For Gunn, pragmatism is no longer concerned solely with the nature of knowledge and the meaning of truth. Because of its insistence on critical self-awareness, its opposition to closed systems of thought, and its concern with the ethical, political, and practical contexts of ideas, pragmatism offers a blueprint for performing intellectual work in a world without absolutes. The world Gunn's pragmatism recognizes is one of multiple truths, unstable interpretations, and competing interests. After critically reexamining the nature and scope of the pragmatic legacy, Gunn explores the way pragmatism successfully responds to conceptual and methodological controversies, from the rebirth of ideology, the spread of interdisciplinarity, and the development of the new historicism, to the revolt against theory, the erosion of public discourse, and the problematics of American civil religion. Drawing throughout on the work of William James, Henry James, Sr., John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Clifford Geertz, Frank Lentricchia, Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, and others, Gunn shows that pragmatism, because it offers a way of thinking across the categories of modern intellectual specializations, is located at the intersection of these critical, and often competitive, discourses. The postmodern challenge for the pragmatist thinker is not only how to render these different discourses conversible with one another, but how to turn the salient insights of each into elements of a new democratic and critical public culture, one able to counter the twin threats of ideology and solipsism. Giles Gunn is one of our most acclaimed contemporary critics, and this broad and ambitious book is certain to become one of the central works in the current revival of critical pragmatism and cultural studies.

Transformations in Africana Studies

Transformations in Africana Studies PDF Author: Adebayo Oyebade
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000825914
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book introduces readers to the rich discipline of Africana Studies, reflecting on how it has developed over the last fifty years as an intellectual enterprise for knowledge production about Africa and the African diaspora. The African world has always had a wealth of indigenous knowledge systems, but for the greater part of the scholarly history, hegemonic Western epistemologies have denied the authenticity of African indigenous ways of knowing. The post-colonial era has seen steady and deliberate efforts to expand the frontiers of knowledge about black people and their societies, and to Africanize such bodies of knowledge in all fields of human endeavor. This book reflects on how the multidisciplinary discipline of Africana Studies has transformed and reinvented itself as it has sought to advance knowledge about the African world. The contributors consider the foundations of the discipline, its key theories and methods of knowledge production, and how it interacts with popular culture, Women’s Studies, and other area studies such as Ethnic and Afro-Latinix Studies. Bringing together rich insights from across history, religion, literature, art, sociology, and philosophy, this book will be an important read for students and researchers of Africa and Africana Studies.

Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States

Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States PDF Author: Mark Bayer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000416895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States extends the growing body of scholarship on Shakespeare’s appropriation by examining how the plays have been invoked during periods of extreme social, political, and racial turmoil. How do the ways that Shakespeare is adapted, studied, and discussed during periods of civil conflict differ from wars between nations? And how have these conflicts, in turn, affected how Shakespeare has been understood in these two countries that, more than any others, continue to be deeply shaped by Shakespeare’s complex, enduring, and multivalent legacy? The essays in this volume collectively disclose a fascinating genealogy of how Shakespeare became a dynamic presence in factional discourse and explore the "war of words" that has accompanied civil wars and other instances of domestic disturbance. Whether as part of violent confrontations, mutinies, rebellions, or within the universal struggle for civil rights, Shakespeare’s repeated appearance during such turbulent moments is more than mere historical coincidence. Rather, its inflections on the contested meanings of citizenship, community, and political legitimacy demonstrate the generative influence of the plays on our understanding of internecine strife in both countries.