Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory

Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory PDF Author: Michael Paul Spikes
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570034985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In this revised edition of Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory, Michael P. Spikes adds Stanley Fish and Susan Bordo to the critics whose careers, key texts, and central assumptions he discusses in introducing readers to developments in American literary theory during the past thirty-five years. Underscoring the largely heterogeneous mix of strategies and suppositions that these critics, along with Paul de Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Edward W. Said, and Stephen Greenblatt, represent, Spikes offers concise analyses of their principal claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, from deconstruction, African American studies, and reader-response theory to political criticism, the new historicism, and feminism.

Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory

Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory PDF Author: Michael Paul Spikes
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570034985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book

Book Description
In this revised edition of Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory, Michael P. Spikes adds Stanley Fish and Susan Bordo to the critics whose careers, key texts, and central assumptions he discusses in introducing readers to developments in American literary theory during the past thirty-five years. Underscoring the largely heterogeneous mix of strategies and suppositions that these critics, along with Paul de Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Edward W. Said, and Stephen Greenblatt, represent, Spikes offers concise analyses of their principal claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, from deconstruction, African American studies, and reader-response theory to political criticism, the new historicism, and feminism.

Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism

Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism PDF Author: Barry Laga
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351357476
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism is a completely fresh and innovative approach to teaching and learning literary theory: using short passages of theory to make sense of literary and cultural texts. It focuses on the key concepts that help readers understand literature and cultural events in new and provocative ways. Covering a wide variety of iconic and contemporary theorists, the book offers a broad chronological and global overview, including thirty passages from theorists such as Viktor Shklovsky, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Jean Baudrillard, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michel Foucault, Monique Wittig, and Eve Sedgwick. Built on the premise that scholars use theory pragmatically, Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism identifies problems, puzzles, and questions readers may encounter when they read a story, watch a film, or look at artwork. It explains, in detail, thirty concepts that help readers make sense of these works and invites students to apply the concepts to a range of writing and research projects. The textbook concludes by helping students read theory with an eye on finding productive passages and writing their own “theory chapter,” signaling a shift from student as critic to student as theorist. Used as a main text in introductory theory courses or as a supplement to any literature, film, theater, or art course, this book helps students read closely and think critically.

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: 1785274392
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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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.

Understanding David Foster Wallace

Understanding David Foster Wallace PDF Author: Marshall Boswell
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643360701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Since its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction—namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The Pale King. Tracing Wallace's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, this volume provides close readings of all his major works of fiction. Although critics sometimes label Wallace a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. In charting a new direction for literary practice, Wallace does not seek to overturn postmodernism, nor does he call for a return to modernism. Rather his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back. Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism, yet it does so in a way that is comprehensible to a wide and general readership—the very same readership that has enthusiastically embraced Wallace's challenging yet entertaining and redemptive fiction.

Contemporary Literary Theory

Contemporary Literary Theory PDF Author: George Douglas Atkins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780333496589
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This series of essays analyzes the relationship between contemporary literary theory and critical and pedagogical practice. The authors have selected 12 of the most prominent, influential and far-reaching theoretical positions currently available, such as hermeneutics and psychoanalysis.

Understanding Edmund White

Understanding Edmund White PDF Author: Nicholas F. Radel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611171365
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Understanding Edmund White makes White's early experimental novels, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Caracole, as well as his later historical fiction, Fanny and Hotel de Dream, accessible by showing how their emphasis on sexuality and social change connects them to the autobiographical fictions. Radel also shows how White's most recent novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend, deftly combines historical and autobiographical narratives to become one of the author's most nuanced explorations of American sexuality. Understanding Edmund White additionally contains a new, previously unpublished interview with White that provides revealing information about the impact his work as a biographer has had on his later fiction.

Seductive Reasoning

Seductive Reasoning PDF Author: Ellen Rooney
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501706993
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Seductive Reasoning takes a provocative look at contemporary Anglo-American literary theory, calling into question the critical consensus on pluralism's nature and its status in literary studies. Drawing on the insights of Marxist and feminist critical theory and on the works of Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault, Rooney reads the pluralist’s invitation to join in a "dialogue" as a seductive gesture. Critics who respond find that they must seek to persuade all of their potential readers. Rooney examines pluralism as a form of logic in the work of E. D. Hirsch, as a form of ethics for Wayne Booth, as a rhetoric of persuasion in the books of Stanley Fish. For Paul de Man, Rooney argues, pluralism was a rhetoric of tropes just as it was, for Fredric Jameson, a form of politics.

Understanding Cormac McCarthy

Understanding Cormac McCarthy PDF Author: Steven Frye
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611172047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Named by Harold Bloom as one of the most significant American novelists of our time, Cormac McCarthy has been honored with the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, and the coveted MacArthur Fellowship. In Understanding Cormac McCarthy Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of McCarthy's fiction to date, dealing with the author's aesthetic and thematic concerns, his philosophical and religious influences, and his participation in Western literary traditions. Frye provides extensive readings of each novel, charting the trajectory of McCarthy's development as a writer who invigorates literary culture both past and present through a blend of participation, influence, and aesthetic transformation. He explores the early works of the Tennessee period in the context of the romance genre, the southern gothic, and the grotesque. A chapter is devoted to Blood Meridian, a novel that marks McCarthy's transition to the West and his full recognition as a major force in American letters. Frye also explores McCarthy's Border Trilogy and his later works—specifically No Country for Old Men and The Road—addressing the manner in which McCarthy's preoccupation with violence and human depravity exists alongside a perpetual search for meaning, purpose, and value.

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction PDF Author: Darren Harris-Fain
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570035852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970-2000 explores the major trends and developments during three decades that witnessed science fiction's most dramatic progression from subliterary escapist entertainment to a more sophisticated literature of ideas. Darren Harris-Fain suggests that to understand American science fiction fully, it is essential to realize that the current field with all its variety results from the proceeding decades of writings. In addition, he contends that although much science fiction of merit was written in America prior to 1970, the latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic improvement in quality, even as the field fragmented into a variety of subgenres and as writers sought to transcend earlier critical dismissals. Harris-Fain discusses significant and representative works, most of which mainstream literary scholars and critics ignore, as he charts the historical and literary development of contemporary American science fiction. the internal divisions along both literary and political lines experienced during the Vietnam era; the influence of the feminist movement and other contemporary concerns; the increasing contributions of female, African American, and gay and lesbian writers; and the emergence of such significant trends as hard science fiction, cyberpunk, alternate history, and shared-world stories. Harris-Fain also considers literary science fiction's relationship to the mass media, the effects the popularity of fantasy has on the field, and academia's continued misprizing of the genre.

Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature

Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature PDF Author: Deborah L. Madsen
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570033797
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Exploring the work of six notable authors, this text reveals characteristic themes, images and stylistic devices that make contemporary Chicana writing a vibrant and innovative part of a burgeoning Latina creativity.