The Return of Thematic Criticism

The Return of Thematic Criticism PDF Author: Werner Sollors
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674766877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
This performance of the Giuseppe Verdi opera La Traviata in the picturesque setting of the Sydney Harbour features vocalists such as Emma Matthews, Gianluca Terranova, and Jonathan Summers in the leading roles. ~ Cammila Collar, Rovi

The Return of Thematic Criticism

The Return of Thematic Criticism PDF Author: Werner Sollors
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674766877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
This performance of the Giuseppe Verdi opera La Traviata in the picturesque setting of the Sydney Harbour features vocalists such as Emma Matthews, Gianluca Terranova, and Jonathan Summers in the leading roles. ~ Cammila Collar, Rovi

The Return of Thematic Criticism

The Return of Thematic Criticism PDF Author: Werner Sollors
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
Once it was anathema to speak about the content of a work of art in the wake of high modernism and formalism. Critical practice has moved beyond such limits, and today the focus on themes is the hallmark of feminist, new historicist, ethnic, and even deconstructionist approaches, though that focus may not always be openly declared. This manifesto reasserts the validity of the thematic approach to criticism in our day, bringing together for the first time an international group of critics and theoreticians who have thought deeply about literary motifs and themes. How can we determine the theme of a given text? May the focus on form be the theme of a certain moment? Can the motif be understood as a formal category? What operations permit us to say that three or four texts constitute variants of the same theme? The contributors challenge the conventional dismissal of "merely" thematic approaches and offer the reader different ways of tackling the issue of what a piece of writing is "about." The work here comes out of such diverse intellectual traditions as Russian film theory, French phenomenology, Foucault, narratology, the Frankfurt School, intellectual history (Geistesgeschichte), psychoanalytic criticism, linguistics, ideological criticism, Proppian folklore studies, and computerized plot summary models. In addition to a collection of aphorisms from Plato to Robert Coover and a group of general and theoretical essays, this volume contains examples of practical engagement with such topics as literary history, Shakespeare, autumn poetry, anti-Semitism, fading colors, bachelors, Richard Wagner, and the Mexican Revolution. No comparable volume exists.

Thematics Reconsidered

Thematics Reconsidered PDF Author: Trommler
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004651268
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
Responding to a new interest in thematic studies, the volume features essays by some of the leading scholars from the United States and Europe. In honor of Horst S. Daemmrich, the co-author with Ingrid Daemmrich of the handbook Themes and Motifs in Western Literature, the contributors reassess, both in theory and in case studies, the viability of thematics as part of contemporary literary criticism. They demonstrate the broad scope of methodologies between strict systematization of themes and motifs and reader-response conceptions of 'theming.' Special topics include a thematology of the Jewish people; motifs in folklore; a cluster on madness, hysteria, and mastery; the story of Judith; Cinderella; thematics in Dürrenmatt and Isaac Babel; chaos as a theme. A concluding chapter illuminates aspects of nineteenth-century literary history.

Neither Black Nor White Yet Both

Neither Black Nor White Yet Both PDF Author: Werner Sollors
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674607804
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 596

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why can a "white" woman give birth to a "black" baby, while a "black" woman can never give birth to a "white" baby in the United States? What makes racial "passing" so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making "miscegenation" appear as if it were incest? Werner Sollors examines these questions and others in "Neither Black nor White yet Both," a fully researched investigation of literary works that, in the past, have been read more for a black-white contrast of "either-or" than for an interracial realm of "neither, nor, both, and in-between." From the origins of the term "race" to the cultural sources of the "Tragic Mulatto," and from the calculus of color to the retellings of various plots, Sollors examines what we know about race, analyzing recurrent motifs in scientific and legal works as well as in fiction, drama, and poetry. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Ethnic Modernism

Ethnic Modernism PDF Author: Werner Sollors
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674030916
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Werner Sollors's monograph looks into how African American, European immigrant and other minority writers gave the United States its increasingly multicultural self-awareness, focusing on their use of the strategies opened up by modernism.

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism PDF Author: Maud Ellmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317896785
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of essays provides students of literary critical theory with an introduction to Freudian methods of interpretation, and shows how those methods have been transformed by recent developments in French psychoanalysis, particularly by the influence of Jacques Lacan. It explains how classical Freudian criticism tended to focus on the thematic content of the literary text, whereas Lacanian criticism focuses on its linguistic structure, redirecting the reader to the words themselves. Concepts and methods are defined by tracing the role played by the drama of Oedipus in the development of psychoanalytic theory and criticism. The essays cover a wide generic scope and are divided into three parts: drama, narrative and poetry. Each is accompanied by explanatory headnotes giving clear definitions of complex terms.

Hermeneutics, Linguistics, and the Bible

Hermeneutics, Linguistics, and the Bible PDF Author: Stanley E. Porter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567709930
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
The volume presents Stanley E. Porter's considered thoughts and reflections on key questions of meaning and context, addressing the problems of biblical interpretation and how a close collaboration between hermeneutics and linguistics can help to solve them. The chapters display Porter's work in both fields, examining how hermeneutics functions as a field in modern biblical studies, and how the quest for meaning in biblical texts is underpinned by the study of linguistics. The volume focuses on context for understanding the meanings of biblical texts. Porter suggests that linguists can learn more from the philosophical questions around meaning that hermeneutics apply in their study of biblical texts, and that there is more fruitful work to be done in the field of hermeneutics using insights from linguistics.

Thematics

Thematics PDF Author: Max Louwerse
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027238898
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Get Book Here

Book Description
Themes play a central role in our everyday communication: we have to know what a text is about in order to understand it. Intended meaning cannot be understood without some knowledge of the underlying theme. This book helps to define the concept of 'themes' in texts and how they are structured in language use. Much of the literature on Thematics is scattered over different disciplines (literature, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science), which this detailed collection pulls together in one coherent overview. The result is a new landmark for the study and understanding of themes in their everyday manifestation.

The Eden Narrative

The Eden Narrative PDF Author: Tryggve N. D. Mettinger
Publisher: Eisenbrauns
ISBN: 1575061414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a book marked by unusually readable yet academic style, Mettinger transforms our knowledge of the story of Eden in Genesis. He shows us a story focused on a divine test of human obedience, with human disobedience and its consequences as its main theme. Both of the special trees in Eden had a function: the tree of knowledge as the test case, and the tree of life as the potential reward for obedience. Mettinger adopts a two-tiered approach. In a synchronic move, he understakes a literary analysis that yields striking observations on narratology, theme, and genre in the text studied. He defines the genre as myth and subjects the narrative to a functional analysis. He then applies a diachronic approach and presents a tradition-historical reconstruction of an Adamic myth in Ezekiel 28. The presence of both wisdom and immortality in this myth leads to a discussion of these divine prerogatives in Mesopotamian literature (remember Adapa and Gilgamesh). The two prerogatives demarcated an ontological boundary between the divine and human spheres. Nevertheless, the Eden Narrative does not evaluate the human desire to obtain knowledge or wisdom negatively. A piece of fresh, original scholarship in accessible form, this book is ideal for courses on creation, primeval history, the Bible and literature, and the Bible and the ancient Near East.

The Earth Mourns

The Earth Mourns PDF Author: Katherine Murphey Hayes
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004126985
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book applies current research on oral traditional poetry to the biblical metaphor of the mourning earth as expressed in nine texts, illustrating an oral aesthetic within the biblical prophetic traditions over a range of historical settings and prophetic genres. Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).