Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory

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Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory

Author : Michael Paul Spikes
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1570034982

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Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory by Michael Paul Spikes Pdf

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.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory

Author : Irene Rima Makaryk
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 676 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 1993-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 080206860X

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Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory by Irene Rima Makaryk Pdf

The last half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of literary theory as a new discipline. As with any body of scholarship, various schools of thought exist, and sometimes conflict, within it. I.R. Makaryk has compiled a welcome guide to the field. Accessible and jargon-free, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory provides lucid, concise explanations of myriad approaches to literature that have arisen over the past forty years. Some 170 scholars from around the world have contributed their expertise to this volume. Their work is organized into three parts. In Part I, forty evaluative essays examine the historical and cultural context out of which new schools of and approaches to literature arose. The essays also discuss the uses and limitations of the various schools, and the key issues they address. Part II focuses on individual theorists. It provides a more detailed picture of the network of scholars not always easily pigeonholed into the categories of Part I. This second section analyses the individual achievements, as well as the influence, of specific scholars, and places them in a larger critical context. Part III deals with the vocabulary of literary theory. It identifies significant, complex terms, places them in context, and explains their origins and use. Accessibility is a key feature of the work. By avoiding jargon, providing mini-bibliographies, and cross-referencing throughout, Makaryk has provided an indispensable tool for literary theorists and historians and for all scholars and students of contemporary criticism and culture.

Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism

Author : Barry Laga
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2018-09-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351357470

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Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism by Barry Laga Pdf

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.

Understanding Edmund White

Author : Nicholas F. Radel
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1611171369

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Understanding Edmund White by Nicholas F. Radel Pdf

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.

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction

Author : Darren Harris-Fain
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1570035857

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Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction by Darren Harris-Fain Pdf

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

Author : Deborah L. Madsen
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 157003379X

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Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature by Deborah L. Madsen Pdf

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.

The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism

Author : H. Aram Veeser
Publisher : Anthem Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2020-11-27
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781785274398

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The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism by H. Aram Veeser Pdf

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.

A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

Author : Raman Selden
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : STANFORD:36105038578964

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A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden Pdf

Unsurpassed as a text for upper-division and beginning graduate students, Raman Selden's classic text is the liveliest, most readable and most reliable guide to contemporary literary theory. Includes applications of theory, cross-referenced to Selden's companion volume, Practicing Theory and Reading Literature.

Critical Theory Today

Author : Lois Tyson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 486 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2012-09-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781136615566

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Critical Theory Today by Lois Tyson Pdf

Critical Theory Today is the essential introduction to contemporary criticial theory. It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness. This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.

Understanding David Foster Wallace

Author : Marshall Boswell
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2020-09-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781643360706

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Understanding David Foster Wallace by Marshall Boswell Pdf

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.

The Pleasures of Babel

Author : Jay Clayton
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : American literature
ISBN : 9780195083736

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The Pleasures of Babel by Jay Clayton Pdf

The Pleasures of Babel acquaints the layperson and the expert alike with the creative and intellectual achievements of America's multicultural society. Arguing that the present is "a great period of writing," Jay Clayton relates novels from the seventies, eighties, and nineties to the latest developments in literary theory. He offers a lucid, cutting-edge look at the often stormy relationship between contemporary literature and criticism. Avoiding theoretical jargon, Clayton systematically sets out to make sense of the critical movements of the last two decades: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, minority writing, multiculturalism, and feminism. In the course of clarifying the accomplishments of Barthes, Kristeva, Lyotard, Said, and others, the author discusses some of America's most prominent writers of fiction: Saul Bellow, Sandra Cisneros, E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, and many others. The result successfully weds a layperson's guide to recent criticism with a scholarly application of that criticism to the very works it concerns. In light of the current debates being waged over the canon and multiculturalism, The Pleasures of Babel should prove an indispensable tool for those engaged in the practice of literary criticism, as well as anyone concerned with the way in which narrative interacts with society.

Conversations

Author : Charles Moran,Elizabeth Penfield
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 1990
Category : Education
ISBN : STANFORD:36105031220564

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Conversations by Charles Moran,Elizabeth Penfield Pdf

An extension of conversations that originally took place at summer institutes devoted to literary theory (sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English), this book presents diverse critical perspectives on current topics of literature, such as post-structuralism, cultural criticism, reader-response theory, and issues of gender and canon. Articles, listed with their authors, are as follows: (1) "Literature and Authority" (Myra Jehlen); (2) "A Short Course in Post-Structuralism" (Jane Tompkins); (3) "The Turns of Reader-Response Criticism" (Steven Mailloux); (4) "The Master's Pieces: On Canon Formation and the Afro-American Tradition" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.); (5) "Authority, Desire, and Canons: Tendentious Meditations on Cultural Literacy" (James C. Raymond); (6) "Our Missing Theory" (Janet Emig); (7) "A Passage into Critical Theory" (Steven Lynn); (8) "Contrarieties of Emotion, or, Five Days with 'Pride and Prejudice'" (Walker Gibson); (9) "Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Universal: A Case Study on 'Walden'" (Irene C. Goldman); (10) "Professor, Why Are You Wasting Our Time?" (Warren Rosenberg); (11) "Delivering on the Promise of Liberal Education" (Joel Wingard); (12) "Teaching Literature in the Post-Structuralist Era: A Classroom Teacher's Agenda" (Lloyd N. Dendinger); (13) "Dispatching 'Porphyria's Lover'" (Joseph Dupras); (14) "Reading 'Life in the Iron-Mills' Contextually: A Key to Rebecca Harding Davis's Fiction" (Jane Atteridge Rose); (15) "Local Canons: Professing Literature at the Small Liberal Arts College" (Bobby Fong); (16) "The Structuralist Community College Student in a Post-Structuralist Age: (Judy Arnold and Benjamin S. Howard); and (17) "Gender Differences: Both/And, Not Either/Or" (Nancy Vogel). (KEH)

Literary Theories

Author : Julian Wolfreys
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 687 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 1999-09
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780814793619

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Literary Theories by Julian Wolfreys Pdf

The first reader and introductory guide to literary theory—includes close readings and a full glossary and bibliography Literary Theories is the first reader and introductory guide in one volume. Divided into 12 sections covering structuralism, feminism, marxism, reader-response theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post-structuralism, postmodernism, new historicism, postcolonialism, gay studies and queer theory, and cultural studies, Literary Theories introduces the reader to the most challenging and engaging aspects of critical studies in the humanities today. Classic essays representing the different theoretical positions and offering striking examples of close readings of literature are preceded by new introductions which present the theory in question and discuss its main currents. With a full glossary and detailed bibliography, Literary Theories is the perfect introductory guide and reader in one volume. Included are essays by Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Homi K. Bhabha, Judith Butler, Terry Castle, Iain Chambers, Rey Chow, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Dollimore, Terry Eagleton, Catherine Gallagher, Stephen Heath, Wolfgang Iser, Fredric Jameson, Hans Robert Jauss, Claire Kahane, Gail Ching Liang Low, Mary Lydon, Jean-François Lyotard, James M. Mellard, D.A. Miller, J. Hillis Miller, Louis Adrian Montrose, Michael Riffaterre, Avital Ronell, Nicholas Royle, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Alan Sinfield, and Raymond Williams.

Seductive Reasoning

Author : Ellen Rooney
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2016-11-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501706998

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Seductive Reasoning by Ellen Rooney Pdf

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.

Contemporary Literary Theory

Author : George Douglas Atkins,Laura Morrow
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Criticism
ISBN : 0333496582

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Contemporary Literary Theory by George Douglas Atkins,Laura Morrow Pdf

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.