Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisWhat role do metaphors play in philosophical language? Are they impediments to clear thinking that should be eradicated in the interests of terminological exactness? Or can they be used by philosophers to indicate the attitudes that regulate an epoch?Trade ReviewParadigms for a Metaphorology is a model of scholarly translation. Savage's handling of citations and sources is scrupulous and thorough.... And he provides judicious explanatory notes that work in conjunction with the afterword and Blumenberg's own notes to guide readers through Blumenberg's own reading and career. Finally, and most importantly, his English rendering is consistently accurate while also being, in the context of translations of German philosophy, remarkably readable.... In short, readers approaching Blumenberg's reflections on metaphor through the English language could not ask for a more reliable and helpful guide than this volume. -- David Adams * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *Table of ContentsHans Blumenberg: An Introduction Part I: History, Secularization, and Reality 1. The Linguistic Reality of Philosophy (1946/1947) 2. World Pictures and World Models (1961) 3. "Secularization": Critique of a Category of Hisotrical Illegitimacy (1964) 4. The Concept of Reality and the Theory of the State (1968/1969) 5. Preliminary Remarks on the Concept of Reality (1974) Part II: Metaphors, Rhetoric, and Nonconceptuality 6. Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation (1957) 7. Introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960) 8. An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric (1971) 9. Observations Drawn from Metaphors (1971) 10. Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality (1979) 11. Theory of Nonconceptuality (circa 1975, excerpt) Part III: Nature, Technology, and Asthetics 12. The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem (1951) 13. "Imitation of Nature": Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being (1957) 14. Phenomenological Aspects on Life-World and Technization (1963) 15. Socrates and the objet ambigu: Paul Valery's Discussion of the Ontology of the Aesthetic Object and Its Tradition (1964) 16. The Essential Ambiguity of the Aesthetic Object (1966) 17. Speech Situation and Immanent Poetics (1966) Part IV: Fables, Anecdotes, and the Novel 18. The Absolute Father (1952/1953) 19. The Mythos and Ethos of America in the Work of William Faulkner (1958) 20. The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel (1964) 21. Pensiveness (1980) 22. Moments of Goethe (1982) 23. Beyond the Edge of Reality: Three Short Essays (1983) 24. Of Nonunderstanding: Glosses on Three Fables (1984) 25. Unknown Aesopica: From Newly Found Fables (1985) 26. Advancing into Eternal Silence: A Century after the Sailing of the Fram (1993)

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Book SynopsisCharles Altieri, one of our foremost analysts of modernism, has in his recent work argued for the importance of the affects, which philosophy has too long subordinated to cognition and ethics. In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Altieri focuses his attention on modernist poetry, especially that of Wallace Stevens. He argues that critics have failed to appreciate the degree to which modernist poetry, like modernist art, breaks from the epistemology that arose from cultures of empiricism. If we recognize the limits of that authority we can also recognize the close positive affinities between how we feel and how we value.Nineteenth-century writing wanted to build values out of ways of looking at what could be established as fact. Early modernist poetry, particularly that of Stevens and Pound, labors to adapt Nietzschean attitudes toward poetry. Then Stevens embarked on an imaginative journey to find in linguistic activity itself a sufficient model for how we Trade ReviewAltieri provides the most authoritative treatment of Stevens in more than a decade.... He combines aesthetics and philosophy in a rigorous manner that is nonetheless resolutely literary. Wisely eschewing a commentary on all of Stevens's poems, Altieri extracts original interpretive insights from close reading, as seen in his discernment, in 'Farewell to Florida,' of a flight from the female that is as much wishful thinking as renunciation, and a reading of 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' in which he emphasizes how the different perspectives ‘fuse’ over the disjunction emphasized by critics such as Harold Bloom. Altieri's detailed explication... reveals him as a dazzling reader of this difficult poet. Summing Up: Highly recommended. * Choice *Table of Contents1. Philosophical Poetry and the Demands of Modernity2. Harmonium as a Modernist Text3. "Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds": The Parts Negation Played in Developing a New Poetic4. How Stevens Uses the Grammar of As5. Aspectual Thinking6. Stevens's Tragic Mode: Why the Angel Must Disappear in “Angel Surrounded by Paysans”7. Aspect- Seeing and Its Implications in The RockNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book brings together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to explore the possibilities and limitations of presence from a variety of perspectivesTrade Review"Presence offers a timely constellation of essays addressing the recent turn toward presence in various disciplines, notably aesthetics, literary criticism, philosophy, and history. The interacting essays in this volume provide an informed, thought-provoking, sometimes contestable, and at points uncannily defamiliarizing guide to the sinuous, many-sided turn to presence." -- Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University, author of History, Literature, Critical Theory"This book can be compared to a river: starting from the central notion of presence its chapters cover a whole delta of theoretical issues. In truly impressive fashion, the authors convince readers of the importance of the notion of presence. There is a certain ground to their argument, namely a 'return to the real.' The stakes could not possibly be higher and it cannot be doubted that with the notion of presence a new paradigm in the humanities announces itself." -- Frank Ankersmit, University of Groningen, author of Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical RepresentationTable of ContentsPrologue Ethan Kleinberg 1. Presence in absentia Ethan Kleinberg 2. Be Here Now: Mimesis and the History of Representation Vincent P. Pecora 3. Meaning, Truth, and Phenomenology Mark Bevir 4. Of Photographs, Puns and Presence Susan Crane 5. The Public Rendition of Images Médusées: Exhibiting Souvenir Photographs taken at Lynchings in America Roger I. Simon 6. The Presence of Immigrants, or Why Mexicans and Arabs Look Alike John Michael 7. Transcultural Presence Bill Ashcroft 8. It Disturbs Me With a Presence: Hindu History and What Meaning Cannot Convey Ranjan Ghosh 9. The Presence and Conceptualization of Contemporary Protesting Crowds Suman Gupta Epilogue: Presence Continuous

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Book SynopsisWith an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considered deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader-response criticism. On Deconstruction is both an authoritative synthesis of Derrida's thought and an analysis of the often-problematic relation between his philosophical writings and the...Trade ReviewAcademic literary criticism continues to be dominated by 'theory' and the struggle between deconstructionist and humanist approaches to the business of reading. Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction is a typically patient, thoughtful, illuminating exposition of the ideas of Jacques Derrida and their application to literary studies. -- David Lodge * Commonweal *As a practicing critic, Culler has always been a deconstructor, and he approaches this topic with special immediacy and force. In On Deconstruction, he offers generous summaries of numerous representative articles and a fine annotated bibliography.... His magisterial way of tracing particular topics and techniques through our diaspora of critical texts, and his provocative analyses, cannot fail to focus any critic's thinking about deconstruction. * Modern Language Quarterly *Culler is lucid and thorough, can move into and out of other people's arguments without losing the sense of his own voice and argument, and can manage to seem equally at home with Freudianism, feminism, and traditional literary criticism. * Times Literary Supplement *Gifted with grace and clarity, Culler provides us with a stimulating survey of contemporary literary criticism. * Antioch Review *Table of ContentsPreface to the 25th Anniversary EditionPreface to the First EditionIntroductionChapter One. Readers and Reading1. New Fortunes2. Reading as a Woman3. Stories of ReadingChapter Two. Deconstruction1. Writing and Logocentrism2. Meaning and Iterability3. Grafts and Graft4. Institutions and Inversions5. Critical ConsequencesChapter Three. Deconstructive CriticismBibliographyTranslations BibliographyBibliography for the 25th Anniversary EditionIndex

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Book SynopsisAutobiography is naturally regarded as an art of retrospect, but making autobiography is equally part of the fabric of our ongoing experience. We tell the stories of our lives piecemeal, and these stories are not merely about our selves but also an integral part of them. In this way we live autobiographically; we have narrative identities.In this book, noted life-writing scholar Paul John Eakin explores the intimate, dynamic connection between our selves and our stories, between narrative and identity in everyday life. He draws on a wide range of autobiographical writings from work by Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and André Aciman to the New York Times series Portraits of Grief memorializing the victims of 9/11, as well as the latest insights into identity formation from the fields of developmental psychology, cultural anthropology, and neurobiology. In his account, the self-fashioning in which we routinely, even automatically, engage is largely conditioned by social norms andTrade Review"In this fascinating, lucid, and deeply humanistic extension of his earlier work on autobiography, Paul John Eakin illuminates the acts by which we become players in a dynamic narrative identity system that is fundamental to our sense of self. Eakin energetically pursues the broadest questions, deftly incorporating insights from neurobiology and anthropology to help us see the ways that autobiography is an integral, adaptive part of our experience as we live it, and of our creation of a future." -- Jeffrey Wallen, Hampshire College, author of Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture"Living Autobiographically is a wide-ranging and compelling meditation on the grounds for believing that various registers of narrative are essential to our sense of who we are. As ever, Paul John Eakin is leading reflection on life writing into new places." -- David Parker, Chinese University of Hong Kong, author of The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the GoodTable of Contents1. Talking about Ourselves: The Rules of the Game Jolting Events The Case against Narrative Identity Truth or Consequences on Oprah The Narrative Identity System Narrative Rules, Identity Rules "My Father's Brain"2. Autobiographical Consciousness: Body, Brain, Self, and Narrative Antonio Damasio and the "Movie-in-the-Brain" Doing Consciousness3. Identity Work: People Making Stories Looking at Vermeer: "Inner" Lives and "Outer" Forces Everyday Lives "'My Father... "' The Pressure of Circumstances, the Power of Story4. Living Autobiographically The Homeostatic Machine "Arbitrage": Andre Adman and "Remembering Remembering"Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisDominick 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 figureTrade ReviewIn his most recent collection of essays, the eminent intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra reconfirms his place as one of the most incisive and theoretically sophisticated scholars in the humanities today. All of the essays in one way or another address a general problem that has preoccupied LaCapra for many years, namely, how can the discipline of history open itself with greater effect toward a more expansive and theoretically informed awareness of its own methods, its present limits, and its future possibilities? In our ongoing and collective explorations of what the call to intensified criticism might mean, the historical profession has no better guide than LaCapra. -- Peter E. Gordon * Journal of Modern History *Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Articulating Intellectual History, Cultural History, and Critical Theory2. Vicissitudes of Practice and Theory3. " Traumatropisms": From Trauma via Witnessing to the Sublime?\4. Toward a Critique of Violence5. Heidegger, Violence, and the Origin of the Work of Art6. Reopening the Question of the Human and the Animal7. Tropisms of Intellectual HistoryIndex

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Book SynopsisAs the pace of cultural globalization accelerates, the discipline of literary studies is undergoing dramatic transformation. Scholars and critics focus increasingly on theorizing difference and complicating the geographical framework defining their approaches. At the same time, Anglophone literature is being created by a remarkably transnational, multicultural group of writers exploring many of the same concerns, including the intersecting effects of colonialism, decolonization, migration, and globalization. Paul Jay surveys these developments, highlighting key debates within literary and cultural studies about the impact of globalization over the past two decades. Global Matters provides a concise, informative overview of theoretical, critical, and curricular issues driving the transnational turn in literary studies and how these issues have come to dominate contemporary global fiction as well. Through close, imaginative readings Jay analyzes the intersecting histories of coTrade ReviewPaul Jay offers an interesting study of a popular theme of the international nature. -- Dr. Zulfiqar Ali * The Midwest Book Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Transnational Turn in Literary StudiesPart One: Globalization and the Study of Literature 1. Difference, Multiculturalism, and the Globalizing of Literary Studies 2. What Is Globalization? 3. Economies, Cultures, and the Politics of Globalization 4. Border Studies: Remapping the Locations of Literary StudyPart Two: Globalization in Contemporary Literature 5. Post–Postcolonial Writing in the Age of Globalization: The God of Small Things, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Moth Smoke 6. Globalization and Nationalism in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss 7. The Cultural Politics of Development in Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness 8. Multiculturalism and Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth 9. Transnational Masculinities in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar WaoConclusionNotes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisThey borrow from published works without attribution. They remake literary creation in the image of consumption. They celebrate the art of scissors and paste. Who are these outlaws? Postmodern culture-jammers or file-sharing teens? No, they are the...Trade ReviewPaul K. Saint-Amour's superb book is a sustained meditation on... the shaping pressures exerted by intellectual-property regimes upon the modern literary imagination.... We know that our cultural lifeblood is something we might as well call fair use—not a doctrine codified by lawmakers and construed by judges, but the homely good sense that can spread calm and tolerance in a crowded world of born imitators. Paul Saint-Amour's book helps us to become better citizens of our imitative culture. -- Robert Spoo * James Joyce Literary Supplement *Paul Saint-Amour's new book is a rich consideration of Western intellectual property law's relation to creative works and how several literary works are self-consciously engaged with contested copyright ideas.... Saint-Amour works to combine his interests in western intellectual property laws, and the directions those laws might have gone and might still go, with his interest in 'the literary property metadiscourse of late modernity.' The combination fruitfully registers the dangerous effects of increased copyright protections on creative freedoms, a danger Saint-Amour laments. -- Lisa Samuels * Symploke *

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Book SynopsisM. H. Abrams''s writings on the Romantics have had an incalculable influence on the literary history of his time. High Romantic Argument, treating as it does various aspects of Abrams''s work, is in a sense an appraisal of that history. Arising from a conference held in his honor at Cornell University in the spring of 1978, it is made up of essays by six distinguished contributors who explore important critical questions related directly or indirectly to Abrams''s work and its broader implications. The essays deal with Wordsworth as a prophet (Geoffrey Hartman) and as a poet of silence (Jonathan Wordsworth); history as metaphor (Wayne C. Booth); the nature of the critical canon (Thomas McFarland); the personal element in literary history (Lawrence Lipking); and the relation of Abrams''s work to current developments in literary criticism (Jonathan Culler).Two central themes run throughout: the radically metaphorical nature of Romantic thought and the tendency of today''

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Book SynopsisAre dreams merely odd things that happen to us at night, sometimes pleasant, sometimes terrifying, but not to be taken too seriously? Is there any reason to think about them at all, other than in terms of questions such as ''Why should Aunt Sarah turn into a bird and invite us all to dinner in her sycamore tree?In this witty and eminently readable book, Bert O. States rethinks both the meaning of dreams and the relationship between dreaming and the telling of stories. Dreams constitute a private literature of the self, he says, thatdespite their seeming lack of order or structurecan help us to understand the very nature of shared literature.Observers have often pointed out narrative elements that are common to dreams and storiesincluding cinematic visual techniques and such plot devices as reversals of fortune and paired villains and antagonists. Drawing on current work in such fields as neurobiology, cognitive psychology, literary theory, and dream theory, States asksTrade ReviewDreaming and Storytelling is both intriguing and complex. We are not only art-making animals but also dream-producing animals, compelled to interpret and re-create our life through imaginative forays and retrievals, even while asleep, and this book explores the complex and ambiguous relationship between dreaming and storytelling. * Modern Language Review *Bert O. States's Dreaming and Storytelling aims at a kind of phenomenological flattening. It seeks to remove from our descriptions of dreaming the idea of hidden intentions and unconscious motivations, the seductions of the buried archetype, of the occulted or repressed meaning. It questions commonplace pictures of surface and depth. Dreaming and Storytelling is a very personal book; it offers pieces of the author's conversation with himself, a report about his own dreams, an attempt to put into dialogue a number of writers he has read and struggled over, an assessment of doubts and suspicions. * Comparative Literature Studies *States' comparison of dreams to the structures and archetypes of waking narratives makes excellent use of narrative theory and is laden with provocative insights. * Psychoanalytic Books: A Quarterly Journal of Reviews *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Problem of Bizarreness 2. Beginnings, Middles, and Endings 3. The Master Forms 4. Scripts and Archetypes 5. Meaning in Dreams and Fictions ConclusionReferences Index

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Book SynopsisElliott Schreiber explores Karl Philipp Moritz's many contributions to the intellectual evolution of the Enlightenment and positions the German thinker as an incisive early observer and theorist of modernity.Trade ReviewSchreiber makes a compelling case that spatial metaphors inform Moritz's understanding of a series of institutions that are each caught up in processes of transformation in the late eighteenth century, and he makes an eloquent case for the modernity of Moritz's thought in these areas. This will prove to be an indispensable book, not just to students of Moritz, but more generally to students of the German eighteenth century, the Age of Goethe, and the European Enlightenment. * The German Quarterly *Karl Philipp Mortiz's peculiar life story, his writing's apparent lack of systematicity, as well as the difficulty to categorize his work all contributed to the relative neglect (especially in the U.S.) of this important eighteenth-century thinker who made major contributions to the eighteenth-century knowledge base. Elliot Schreiber['s] erudite study offers the long-needed response to this neglect. It establishes Moritz as a central voice of Enlightenment who offers a distinctive (and skeptical) perspective on major tenets of his era and across various fields: aesthetics, pedagogy, pyschology, and political theory. * Lessing Yearbook *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Shifting PerspectivesPart I. The Spaces of Art and Myth1. Toward an Aesthetics of the Sublime Augenblick: Moritz Reading Die Leiden des jungen Werthers2. Beyond an Aesthetics of Containment: Trajectories of the Imagination in Moritz and GoethePart II. The Spaces of Cognition and Education3. Laying the Foundation for Independent Thought: Enlightenment Epistemology and Pedagogy4. Thinking inside the Box: Moritz contra PhilanthropismPart III. The Spaces of the Political and the Individual5. Raising (and Razing) the Common House: Moritz and the Ideology of Commonality6. Pressing Matters: Moritz's Models of the Self in the Magazin zur ErfahrungsseelenkundeConclusion: Moritz's Inner-Worldly Critique of ModernityBibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn Inconceivable Effects, Martin Blumenthal-Barby reads theoretical, literary and cinematic works that appear noteworthy for the ethical questions they raise. Via critical analysis of writers and filmmakers whose projects have changed our ways of viewing the modern worldincluding Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, the directors of Germany in Autumn, and Heiner Müllerthese essays furnish a cultural base for contemporary discussions of totalitarian domination, lying and politics, the relation between law and body, the relation between law and justice, the question of violence, and our ways of conceptualizing the human. A consideration of ethics is central to the book, but ethics in a general, philosophical sense is not the primary subject here; instead, Blumenthal-Barby suggests that whatever understanding of the ethical one has is always contingent upon a particular mode of presentation (Darstellung), on particular aesthetic qualities and features of media. WhTrade Review"Blumenthal-Barby (Rice Univ.) explores literary and scholarly discussions of overtly negative topics such as doubt, lying, death (by torture), paradoxical justice, violence, terrorism, and enmity in 20th-century German texts (including one film), all in the context of an ethics of literary representation…. The author provides footnotes and helpful, on occasion critically reflective, English translations of quotations throughout…. Specialists familiar with the texts will be able to absorb the layered analysis. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty." — Choice (January 2014)"Inconceivable Effects is a valuable and suggestive book that advances our understanding of the ways in which ethical questions become visible as aesthetically mediated phenomena of presentation. Martin Blumenthal-Barby's wager is that questions of ethics are not merely negotiated in particular works on the level of their thematic content but rather are brought into focus when the critic considers their formal modes of presentation, that is, their singular, idiomatic, and performative qualities. In short, Blumenthal-Barby demonstrates that the idiomatic and aesthetic dimensions of the literary texts, theoretical works, and cinematic events that he treats pose structural questions of ethicality. This ethicality is to be understood not as a set of normative problems to be negotiated on the level of the concept alone but rather in terms of the very logic in which these questions are formulated by the works’ presentational specificity. Blumenthal-Barby does a shrewd job bringing into fruitful constellation a number of seminal works from the German tradition that contribute to our understanding of the conjunction between the aesthetic and the ethical thus understood. The result is a most engaging piece of scholarship."—Gerhard Richter, Brown University"This smart, ambitious book traces the relationship between ethics and poetics. Discussing the work of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Heiner Müller, and a group of German film directors, Martin Blumenthal-Barby argues that the styles of these theorists, authors, and filmmakers produce not a particular ethical position but ethics effects, not an ethical stance but an (aesthetic) practice of ethics. The ways in which authors engage with their genres amount to a staging of the ethical dilemmas that are addressed thematically in the texts. Ultimately, this ethics effect—or ethics as aesthetic practice—is the ethics of the singular, always tied to a specific text and its form. Inconceivable Effects brillantly demonstrates the value of dismantling the barriers between aesthetic practice and political theory."—Julia Hell, University of MichiganTable of ContentsPrologue: Ethics and Poetics: An Uneasy AffairIntroduction1 "The Odium of Doubtfulness," Or the Vicissitudes of Hannah Arendt's Metaphorical Thinking2 Why Does Hannah Arendt Lie?, Or the Vicissitudes of Imagination3 "A peculiar apparatus": Kafka's Thanatopoetics4 A Strike of Rhetoric: Benjamin’s Paradox of Justice5 Pernicious Bastardizations: Benjamin’s Ethics of Pure Violence6 Germany in Autumn: The Return of the Human7 A Politics of Enmity: Heiner Müller’s Germania Death in BerlinIndex

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Book SynopsisThis is not a book on rhetoric in any narrow sense, but rather concerns its general ambiance and also some of its quite specific manifestations. The thirteen chapters that comprise the book move chronologically from the Renaissance up to the present time.

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, considering history as both process and representation.Trade ReviewHistory, Literature, Critical Theory is a worthy addition to the LaCapra corpus, creating dialogues among history and other fields to enhance the possibilities for desirable change. * American Historical Review *As is true of much of LaCapra's workthis book defies easy disciplinary classification and will be welcomed by readers in a variety of disciplinesincluding Holocaust studies.... LaCapra stands as one of the most important critical theorists in the US todayand this work belongs in extensive collections of theory. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction1. The Mutual Interrogation of History and Literature2. The Quest! The Quest! Conrad and Flaubert3. Coetzee, Sebald, and the Narrative of Trauma4. Historical and Literary Approaches to the "Final Solution": Saul Friedländer and Jonathan Littell5. The Literary, the Historical, and the Sacred: The Question of NazismEpilogue: Recent Figurations of Trauma and Violence: Tarrying with ZizekNotes Index

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Book SynopsisCharles Altieri, one of our foremost analysts of modernism, has in his recent work argued for the importance of the affects, which philosophy has too long subordinated to cognition and ethics. In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Altieri focuses his attention on modernist poetry, especially that of Wallace Stevens. He argues that critics have failed to appreciate the degree to which modernist poetry, like modernist art, breaks from the epistemology that arose from cultures of empiricism. If we recognize the limits of that authority we can also recognize the close positive affinities between how we feel and how we value.Nineteenth-century writing wanted to build values out of ways of looking at what could be established as fact. Early modernist poetry, particularly that of Stevens and Pound, labors to adapt Nietzschean attitudes toward poetry. Then Stevens embarked on an imaginative journey to find in linguistic activity itself a sufficient model for how we Trade ReviewAltieri provides the most authoritative treatment of Stevens in more than a decade.... He combines aesthetics and philosophy in a rigorous manner that is nonetheless resolutely literary. Wisely eschewing a commentary on all of Stevens's poems, Altieri extracts original interpretive insights from close reading, as seen in his discernment, in 'Farewell to Florida,' of a flight from the female that is as much wishful thinking as renunciation, and a reading of 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' in which he emphasizes how the different perspectives ‘fuse’ over the disjunction emphasized by critics such as Harold Bloom. Altieri's detailed explication... reveals him as a dazzling reader of this difficult poet. Summing Up: Highly recommended. * Choice *Table of Contents1. Philosophical Poetry and the Demands of Modernity2. Harmonium as a Modernist Text3. "Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds": The Parts Negation Played in Developing a New Poetic4. How Stevens Uses the Grammar of As5. Aspectual Thinking6. Stevens's Tragic Mode: Why the Angel Must Disappear in “Angel Surrounded by Paysans”7. Aspect- Seeing and Its Implications in The RockNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisBeginning with Aristotle and the Greeks and ending with semiotics and post-structuralism, Theories of the Theatre is the first comprehensive survey of Western dramatic theory. In this expanded edition the author has updated the book and added a new...Trade ReviewA comprehensive and readable guide that will be the standard work for many years to come. * Times Literary Supplement *Carlson has taken on the monumental task of abstracting the major theoretical statements on the theater from the Greeks to the present. He cogently summarizes the texts, drawing comparisons freely while avoiding evaluation. The book's organization is historical, with national divisions until the 20th century, at which time all countries are considered together within much more finely defined time limits. This is a much needed book. * Choice *The coverage in Theories of the Theatre is remarkable. It is already difficult to imagine seriously undertaking theatre studies without this volume in a prominent place on one's shelf. * Theatre Survey *

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Book SynopsisThis book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin's work.Trade Review"The essays offer an important range of views from an international array of historians and literary and cultural critics. These essays investigate Benjamin's engagement with the 'materiality of the past and the epistemology and ethics of its recuperation' the world made available 'in language but also beyond language.'"—Len Findlay, The Structuralist, 1997/1998"The focus on Benjamin and the question of history is extremely welcome. Because Benjamin has been and remains so influential in a variety of academic disciplines, this important scholarly counterweight to the outpouring of more specialized monographic studies is a highly useful contribution."—Richard Wolin, Rice University

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Book SynopsisUsing as her starting point the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Melissa F. Zeiger examines modern transformations of poetic elegy, particularly as they reflect historical changes in the politics of gender and sexuality. Although her focus is primarily...Trade ReviewAn engaged and engaging study of the complex, late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century interactions between death, sexuality, and the changing shapes of elegy. -- Sandra M. Gilbert * Victorian Studies *Melissa Zeiger's well-written book on the modern elegy engages a series of related yet distinct thematic concerns... By helping to break up the standard critical paradigm for elegy and for mourning, by finding a language to embrace poems that lie outside it, and by tracing the gender dynamics of elegy, Melissa Zeiger's Beyond Consolation opens us to varieties of grief within poetry and beyond. -- Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia * Modern Philology *

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Book SynopsisThe Eye's Mind significantly alters our understanding of modernist literature by showing how changing visual discourses, techniques, and technologies affected the novels of that period. In readings that bring philosophies of vision into dialogue with...Trade ReviewA highly nuanced picture of the racial and sexual frames of the modernists eye's mind. * American Literature *The Eye's Mind offers a richly synthetic account of modernism's visual subjects. Indeed, Jacobs is among the first to situate literary modernism within a systematic analysis of visual culture, one that draws on the work of Martin Jay, Luce Irigaray, Susan Bordo, and Robyn Wiegman (among others).... Jacob's strength as a critic lies in her ability to offer fresh, complex readings of theoretical and literary texts and to juxtapose them in surprising and productive ways. * MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, *Jacobs presents a truly fresh analysis of the impact of visual culture on modernist literature.... A consistent, synthetic study that does not disintegrate into theoretical chaos; rather, the integration of all these perspectives into a clear, focused argument is impressive and refreshing. * Choice *This is a lucid, well-researched and documented book that successfully contributes to the critical reimagining of the field of Modernism that has been taking place for the past 20+ years. * Woolf Studies Annual *The Eye's Mind is a study of literary modernism that we have needed for a long while. Our post-structuralist obsession with visuality is everywhere apparent; but it has taken a scholar with Karen Jacobs's deep learning and range of knowledge to help us understand.... She is able to do this, and to do this so well, because her study is genuinely interdisciplinary; its primary strength lies precisely in its synthetic and comparativist aims. * Modernism/modernity *

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Book SynopsisMemoirs in which trauma takes a major—or the major—role challenge the limits of autobiography. Leigh Gilmore presents a series of "limit-cases"—texts that combine elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory while representing...Trade ReviewLeigh Gilmore's The Limits of Autobiography is a fine addition to the body of excellent recent work in trauma studies, and is highly recommended for all working in the mental health disciplines.... The writing is extremely fine throughout, and the book is a rich cornucopia of literary and psychological analyses, theoretical sophistication, and interdisciplinary connectedness; these treasures can only be suggested here. * Metapsychology Online Review *Through theoretically nuanced, lucid, and insightful readings, Gilmore demonstrates the ability of narrative to transform trauma, to speak to a certain truth about the relationship between trauma and identity that goes beyond the exigencies of accuracy and objectivity that pertain to a juridical contect.... Any reader interested in the myriad interpenetrations of violence, the law, identity, family, and life writing will find much to admire in this impressive study. * Biography *Gilmore offers astute and compelling commentaries in relation to the social and psychic forms within which selected autobiographers told their personal stories in literate and unconventional ways.... Informative, thought-provoking chapters comprise this unique and highly recommended contribution to the literary study of the autobiography. * The Bookwatch *Table of ContentsIntroduction - the limits of autobiography; represent yourself; bastard testimony - incest and illegitimacy in Dorothy Allison's "Bastard Out of Carolina"; there will always be a father - transference and the auto/biographical demand in Mikal Gilmore's "Shot in the Heart"; there will always be a mother - serial autobiography and Jamaica Kincaid; without names - an anatomy of absence in Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body"; conclusion - the knowing subject and an alternative jurisprudence of trauma.

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Book SynopsisRussian Formalism, one of the twentieth century's most important movements in literary criticism, has received far less attention than most of its rivals. Examining Formalism in light of more recent developments in literary theory, Peter Steiner here offers the most comprehensive critique of Formalism to date. Steiner studies the work of the...

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Book SynopsisIn Symbolism and Interpretation, Tzvetan Todorov examines two aspects of discourse: its production, which has traditionally been the domain of rhetoric, and its reception, which has always been the object of hermeneutics.Trade Review"With his habitual clarity of exposition and grasp of ideas, Todorov here reviews rhetorical theories of linguistic symbolism and the various models proposed for its interpretation from Aristotle to Hirsch. His conclusions not only are judicious but also promise to be a healthy influence in the age of post-Derridean reconstruction."—Virginia Quarterly Review"Like Todorov's other books, this one is filled with brilliant critical insights and immense learning. Todorov has the gift to deal with large concepts of a very complex order in lucid and direct terms. It is astonishing to see with what ease Todorov wanders across a variety of disciplines and many centuries—from Greek antiquity to the present age—in the course of elucidating his theories on poetics and interpretation."—Melvin J. Friedman, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

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Book SynopsisA new concluding chapter, written especially for the Johns Hopkins edition, presents a coherent and systematically developed survey of those poststructuralist positions most relevant to the placement of "Structure and Society in Literary Historywithin the critical context of the mid 1980s.Table of ContentsPreface to the Original EditionIntroduction: Toward a Theory of Literary HistoryChapter 1. Past Significance and Present Meaning in Literary HistoryChapter 2. The Concept of Tradition ReconsideredChapter 3. Past origins and Present Functions in American Literary HistoryChapter 4. Structuralism and Literary HistoryChapter 5. Metaphor and Historical Criticism: Shakespeare's Imagery RevisitedChapter 6. Structure and History in Narrative Perspective: The Problem of Point of View ReconsideredChapter 7. Text and History: Epilogue, 1984Index of Names

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Book Synopsis''Dazzling and fun, from the memorial to the formidable (or should I say notorious?) Paul de Man, which introduces the possibility of feminist deconstruction, to the revisions and re-readings of motherhood as a nearly untenable discursive position.''--Voice Literary Supplement.Trade ReviewDazzling and fun, from the memorial to the formidable (or should I say notorious?) Paul de Man, which introduces the possibility of feminist deconstruction, to the revisions and re-readings of motherhood as a nearly untenable discursive position. Voice Literary Supplement Dazzling and fun, from the memorial to the formidable (or should I say notorious?) Paul de Man, which introduces the possibility of feminist deconstruction, to the revisions and re-readings of motherhood as a nearly untenable discursive position. Voice Literary SupplementTable of ContentsPreface to the Paperback EditionAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. The Fate of DeconstructionChapter 1. Nothing Fails Like SuccessChapter 2. Rigorous UnreliabilityChapter 3. Is Writerliness Conservative?Chapter 4. Gender Theory and the Yale SchoolChapter 5. Deconstruction, Feminism, and PedagogyPart II. Significant GapsChapter 6. A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove: Obscurity in WaldenChapter 7. Erasing Panama: Mallarmé and the Text of HistoryChapter 8. Teaching Ignorance: L'Ecole des femmesPart III. Poetic DifferencesChapter 9. Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic LanguageChapter 10. Disfiguring Poetic LanguageChapter 11. Les Fleurs du Mal Armé: Some ReflectionsPart IV. Other Inflections of DifferenceChapter 12. Mallarmé as MotherChapter 13. My Monster/My SelfChapter 14. Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching GodChapter 15. Thresholds of Differences: Structures of Address in Zora Neale HurstonChapter 16. Apostrophe, Animation, and AbortionAppendix to Chapter 7Appendix to Chapter 16Notes Index

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Book SynopsisA challenging and multisided meditation on the importance of Derrida to current developments in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical interpretations of literature.Trade ReviewThrough its engagement with literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical texts, Taking Chances introduces a critical vocabulary... with which to analyze questions of influence in a theoretical way. Philosophy and LiteratureTable of ContentsIntroductionChapter 1. My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean StereophoniesChapter 2. The Debts of Deconstruction and Other, Related AssumptionsChapter 3. The Double Game: An IntroductionChapter 4. Atoms Again: The Deaths of IndividualismChapter 5. Institutional Authority vs. Critical Power, or the Uneasy Relations of Psychoanalysis and LiteratureChapter 6. Thomas Hardy, Jacques Derrida, and the "Dislocation of Souls"Chapter 7. GoethezeitIndex

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Book Synopsis"Highly articulate, sophisticated, and tightly imbricated essays. This volume will make exceptionally fine reading for those well-acquainted with the rigorous techniques of theory."--'English Language Notes.Trade ReviewHighly articulate, sophisticated, and tightly imbricated essays. This volume will make exceptionally fine reading for those well-acquainted with the rigorous techniques of theory. English Language Notes.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Truth or ConsequencesChapter 1. Oppositional Professionals: Theory and the Narratives of ProfessionalizationChapter 2. Theory, Pragmatisms, and PoliticsChapter 3. Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and TechnocracyChapter 4. Tolerable Falsehoods: Agency and the Interests of TheoryChapter 5. History as Gesture; or, The Scandel of HistoryChapter 6. Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New historicismChapter 7. Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe's Crusoe/RoxanaChapter 8. And We Are Not Married: A Journal of Musings upon Legal Language and the Ideology of StyleChapter 9. The English InstituteChapter 10. The ProgramSponsoring InstitutionsRegistrants, 1988

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Book SynopsisSince then, both traditional art forms and the modern mass media have contributed to the growing aestheticization of violence.Trade ReviewWell-written and often brilliant. Virginia Quarterly Review Chances are that you'll have a hard time fighting his suasive thesis. Voice Literary SupplementTable of ContentsContents: Preface Introduction Part I ONE Murder as (Fine) Art TWO Murder as (Pure) Action THREE Murder as (Carnal) Knowledge Part II FOUR Mimesis and Murder FIVE Catharsis and Murder AFTERWORD Writing after Murder Notes Index

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Book SynopsisHe demonstrates how literature and philosophy have been driven to account self-critically for a "money of the mindthat pervades all discourse, and concludes the book with a discomforting thesis about the cultural and political limits of literature and philosophy in the modern world.Trade ReviewShell offers admirably close readings [which are] often brilliant... Summary could do little more than hint at the riches laid open. The Eighteenth Century A remarkable piece of work. Valuable for a wide range of readers from the expert to the inquiring generalist. Religious Studies Review

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Book SynopsisDrawing on Derrida, Lacan, and Wittgenstein, Gregory Ulmer offers an example of the new form of writing hypertextuality demands.Trade ReviewIn this volume, 11 pieces explore the nature of critical theory in the age of hypertext, looking variously at computers and democracy, art and pedagogy, indeterminacy, hypertext as resistance, and other probings of the cultural, political, economic, and social effects of the emergence of hypertext. Journal of Communication

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Book SynopsisContributions by: Georges Bataille, Harold Bloom, Laura Brown, Cathy Caruth, Kai Erikson, Shoshana Felman, Henry Krystal, Claude Lanzmann, Dori Laub, Kevin Newmark, Onno van der Hart, and Bessel van der Kolk. Interviews with: Robert Jay Lifton, Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, and Laura PinskyTrade Review"An unusually informative, as well as sensitive, series of essays with important ramifications for interdisciplinary theory and both social and literary thought. Caruth and her contributors work at the very intersection of contemporary life and scholarship."--Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University "These essays offer fresh approaches on the subject of trauma from both a psychoanalytic and contemporary theoretical point of view. The combination of theoretical articles about trauma with interviews about its ongoing effects is a particular strength--and a particularly appropriate approach when the topic itself is silence or testimony about trauma. The book will be of great interest to those in the psychoanalytic community interested in this kind of interdisciplinary work."--Alan Bass, Ph.D., PsychoanalystTable of ContentsPrefacePart I: Trauma and Experience Chapter 1. IntroductionChapter 2. Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of TeachingChapter 3. Truth and Testimony: The Process and the StruggleChapter 4. Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow-UpChapter 5. Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic TraumaChapter 6. Freud: Frontier Concepts, Jewishness, and Interpretation Chapter 7. An Interview with Robert Jay LiftonPart II: Recapturing the PastChapter 8. IntroductionChapter 9. The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of TraumaChapter 10. Notes on Trauma and Community Chapter 11. The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening With Claude LanzmannChapter 12. Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima Chapter 13. Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of LaughterChapter 14. "The AIDS Crisis is Not Over": A Conversation with Gregg Bordowitz, Douglass Crimp, and Laura PinskyContributors

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Book SynopsisDrawing both on French feminisms and on recent historicist scholarship, Ezell points us to new possibilities for the recovery of early modern women's literary history.Trade ReviewEzell's book is radical and revisionary, and especially interesting in its specificity and concentration on a neglected period of female writing. She is not afraid to take issue with established, even sacred, ideas in feminist writing, or to suggest that feminist literary criticism and history has been limited by its own prejudices and acceptance of questionable definitions of what is good and valid... Establishes many lost and missing names and texts within the margins of female literary history. -- Siv Jansson Yearbook of English Studies From 'The Myth of Judith Shakespeare,' to 'Writings by Early Quaker Women,' Ezell's critique cuts a broad swath through women's literature. -- Elaine Gale Boston Phoenix One hopes that her book will be read not only by scholars who have long agreed with her premise, but also by a wider audience that is unfamiliar with Renaissance genres and modes of publication. Journal of English and Germanic Philology

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Book SynopsisAll the selections in this anthology date from the twentieth century-most from the last forty years-and represent the attempts of different theorists, and different theoretical schools, to describe the historical stages of the genre's formal development.Trade ReviewMcKeon's dissections are often breathtaking... [his] anthology is solid, commandingly centered,... superbly energetic and uniquely powerful. -- Marshall Brown Eighteenth-Century Fiction As comprehensive an account of the genre as you could wish. What a marvelous collection and what a skillful editor McKeon is, marshalling the essays into an argument for the novel as a distinct 'literary historical genre' rather than as one element in a bland, all-embracing narrative theory... The outstanding feature of this fine collection is its firm commitment to the art of the novelist. Throughout, there is a profound recognition of the novel's ability to criticise the existing order, to create new and compelling worlds, to extend our grammar and enlarge our vocabulary for coping with the great dramas of life, love, death and the shoelace snapping when you are late for work. -- Gary Day Times Higher Education Supplement The anthology provides not only a splendid guide to thinking about the novel, but also a useful warning against assuming that fiction is merely the instrument of those who wish to dampen revolution, forge national identities, and build empires. -- Jonathan Lamb Studies in English Literature This breathtaking comprehensive collection of essays... is an amazingly ambitious project... McKeon has provided us with an invaluable map of the theoretical and literary-historical landscape surrounding the origins, theories, and developments of the novel. -- Ansgar Nunning Giesen LWU This is a richly stimulating volume, an invaluable resource and challenging intervention for all serious researchers into the novel. This Year's Work in English Studies As a teaching text this anthology can hardly be bettered. -- David Walker British Journal for 18th-Century StudiesTable of ContentsContents and Contributors: Part One: Genre TheoryNorthrop Frye, from Anatomy of Criticism: Four EssaysE. D. Hirsch, from Validity in InterpretationClaudio Guillen, from Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary HistoryJonathan Culler, "Toward a Theory of Non-Genre Literature"Marthe Robert, from Origins of the NovelPart Two: The Novel as Displacement I: StructuralismWalter Benjamin, "The Storyteller"Claude Levi-Strauss, from The Savage Mind, from The Origin of Table Manners, "How Myths Die," from The Naked ManNorthrop Frye, from Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, from Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology, from The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of RomancePart Three: The Novel as Displacement II: PsychoanalysisSigmund Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams, "Family Romances"Marthe Robert, from Origins of the NovelPart Four: Grand Theory IGeorg Lukacs, from The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, from The Historical NovelPart Five: Grand Theory IIJose Ortega y Gasset, from Meditations on Quixote, "Notes on the Novel"Part Six: Grand Theory IIIMikhail M. Bakhtin, from The Dialogic Imagination: Four EssaysPart Seven: Revisionist Grand TheoryIan Watt, from The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and FieldingMichael McKeon, "Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel"Fredric Jameson, from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic ActBenedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of NationalismPart Eight: Privacy, Domesticity, WomenIan Watt, from The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and FieldingNancy Armstrong, from Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the NovelGillian Brown, from Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century AmericaPart Nine: Subjectivity, Character, DevelopmentDorrit Cohn, from Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in FictionAnn Banfield, from Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of FictionAmelie Oksenberg Rorty, "Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals"Franco Moretti, from The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European CultureClifford Siskin, from The Historicity of Romantic DiscoursePart Ten: RealismRosalind Coward and John Ellis, from Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the SubjectMichael McKeon, from "Prose Fiction: Great Britain"George Levine, from The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady ChatterleyMichael Davitt Bell, from The Development of American RomancePart Eleven: Photography, Film, and the NovelHenry James, from "Preface to The Golden Bowl"Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of ExchangeAndre Bazin, "In Defense of Mixed Cinema"Part Twelve: ModernismVirginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction," "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"Georg Lukacs, from Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class StruggleJoseph Frank, from Spatial Form in Modern LiteraturePart Thirteen: The New Novel, the Postmodern NovelAlain Robbe-Grillet, from For a New Novel: Essays on FictionLinda Hutcheon, "Historiographic Metafiction"Part Fourteen: The Colonial and Postcolonial NovelDoris Sommer and George Yudice, "Latin American Literature from the 'Boom' On"Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?"Kumkum Sangari, "The Politics of the Possible"

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewClark describes the book as a 'sampler' of the many cloths of feminist writing. It is theoretically sophisticated and engaging on many levels. -- Kenneth Kidd Michigan Quarterly Review

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Book SynopsisThe process of contemplation that these essays perform, then, is marked by an unceasing pausing for breath (sometimes for many years)."-Carol Jacobs, from In the Language of Walter BenjaminTable of ContentsContents: Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1 Letters from Walter Benjamin 2 Berlin Chronicle: Topographically Speaking 3 Walter Benjamin: Image of Proust 4 Benjamin's Tessera: "Myslowitz-Braunschweig-Marseille" 5 The Monstrosity of Translation: "The Task of the Translator" 6 Emergency, Break: Things Will Never Be the Same (Again) Notes Index

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Book SynopsisEdney, Carole Fabricant, Peter Hulme, Betty Joseph, Kay Dian Kriz, Philip D. Morgan, Anna Neill, Neil Rennie, Joseph Roach, Nicholas Rogers, Benjamin Schmidt, Kate Teltscher, Beth Fowkes Tobin, and Glyndwr WilliamsTrade ReviewA fascinating collection of 21 scholarly essays that collectively argue that globalization-'the movement of ideas across borders over time'-really began in the period between England's Restoration in 1660 and the European Revolutions of 1830. Choice 2004 Should serve as a model for all those who study the past. -- Armstrong Starkey Historian 2005 Excellent collection. Eighteenth Century: Current Bibliography 2007

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Book SynopsisConsidered in its full poetic and philosophical dimensions, the Romance of the Rose thus acquires an altogether new significance in the history of literature: it appears as a work that incessantly explores its own capacity to be other than it is.Trade ReviewBeautiful language... and an elegant, intricate presentation of argument. -- Susan Stakel Speculum 2006 A valuable asset to those interested in discovering fresh interpretations of one of the most remarkable literary works of the Middle Ages. -- Amy L. Ingram Vox Romanica 2005 A sustained and highly original philosophical tour de force. -- Catherine Attwood Medium Aevum 2006 Heller-Roazen's mastery of medieval philology and philosophy is impressive, and representative of a new generation of medieval studies. -- Sarah-Grace Heller French Review 2005Table of ContentsContents: Introduction: The Sense of a Book 1. Inventio Linguae: The Language of Contingency 2. The Nameless Lover, or the Contingent Subject 3. Fortune, or The Contingent Figure 4. Through the Looking-Glass: The Knowledge of Contigency Conclusion: Diverse Verses

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Book Synopsismarketplace economy of the early twentieth century.Trade ReviewPersonal Property represents a valuable and insightful contribution to the study of gender, commodity marketing, and aesthetics, and of their complex interplay during the first two decades in the twentieth-century United States. -- Eric Henderson American Literature

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Book SynopsisAt an extreme, all Holocaust representation must face the test of whether its referent would not be more authentically expressed by silence-that is, by the absence of representation.Trade ReviewHolocaust Representation tackles the thorny subject of ethics and art as they bear on works commemorating or referring to the Holocaust. -- James Malpas Art NewspaperTable of ContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Art Within The LimitsPart I: Image and Fact: The Problem of Holocaust Representation Chapter 1. Writing the Holocaust: Toward the Condition of HistoryChapter 2. Holocaust Texts and the Blurred Genres Chapter 3. The Limits of Representation and the Representation of LimitsChapter 4. The Facts of Fiction: Three Case Studies in Holocaust WritingChapter 5. The Importance of Holocaust Misrepresentation Part II: Eye and Mind: Reflecting the Holocaust Chapter 6. The Arts of HistoryChapter 7. Translating the Holocaust: For Whom Does One Write?Chapter 8. The Post-Holocaust vs. the Postmodern: Evil Inside and Outside HistoryChapter 9. Art Worship and Its ImagesIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAvrom Fleishman's investigative foray into the subtleties of filmic narration confronts the oversimplifications to which theoretical as well as conventional understanding can be prone. The result is a genuine pleasure: a book that combines theory and practice in often illuminating ways... He takes well-known and often-discussed films and freshens awareness of them as much by his unexpected pairings as by his narratological acuity... Narrated Films is a model of informed, generous film criticism because of its author's writerly gift for engagement with his reader. -- John Anzalone Philosophy and Literature This informative study of the various styles of storytelling ranges from straight voice-over to 'mind-screen' narration, a cinematic version of fiction's interior monologue. American Cinematographer

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Book SynopsisOffering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism.Trade ReviewLurie fills a gap in Faulkner studies by looking at the influence of film and popular culture on the great Mississippian's work. Choice 2005 Well structured and elegantly written, this is one of the most important recent books on Faulkner. -- Paula Elyseu American Literature 2006Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction. Adorno's Modernism and the Historicity of Popular CultureChapter 1. "Some Quality of Delicate Paradox": Sanctuary's Generative Conflict of High and LowChapter 2. "Get Me a Nigger": Master, Surveillance, and Joe Christmas's Spectral Identity Chapter 3. "Some Trashy Myth of Reality's Escape": Romance, History, and Film Viewing in Absalom, Absalom! Chapter 4. Screening Readerly Pleasures: Modernism, Melodrama, and Mass Markets in If I Forget Thee, JerusalemConclusion. Modernism, Jail Cells, and the SensesNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisIn Kiddie Lit, Beverly Lyon Clark explores the marginalization of children's literature in America - and recent signs of its reintegration - within the academy and by the mainstream critical establishment. Tracing the reception of works by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L.Trade ReviewThis exemplary contribution to children's literature studies engages both general readers-those interested in Little Women or Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Wizard of Oz, Lewis Carroll, Huck Finn, even J. K. Rowling and Walt Disney-and children's literature specialists. -- Cathryn M. Mercier Horn Book Magazine 2004 This engaging book is particularly absorbing in light of the current adult fascination with the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings titles... Highly recommended. Choice 2004 Terrific and important... Clark tracks the various moves by which 'Kiddie Lit' has been diminished and kept in its place, and she does this by tracing the historical reception of a half dozen or so representative works... A 'must read' for scholars in children's literature. Children's Literature Association Quarterly 2004 [Clark's] thorough documentation of the vagaries of the reception of 'kiddie lit' proves that our negative valuations of youth culture deserve rethinking. -- Ilana Nash Women's Review of Books 2004 Offers a convincing plea for taking kiddie lit seriously, and for accepting the imaginative delight and serious literary pleasures such literature can offer. -- Michael Newton Times Literary Supplement 2005Table of ContentsContents: 1. Kids and Kiddie Lit 2. What Fauntleroy Knew 3. Kiddie Lit in the Academy 4. The Case of the Boy's Book: Whitewashing Huck 5. The Case of the Girl's Book: Jo's Girls 6. The Case of American Fantasy: There's No Place Like Oz 7. The Case of British Fantasy Imports: Alice and Harry in America 8. The Case of the Disney Version

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Book SynopsisThe proceedings of this event-which proved epoch-making on both sides of the Atlantic-were first published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1970 and are now available once again, with a reflective new preface by editor and symposium convener Richard Macksey.Trade ReviewAlthough its original applications were in linguistics and anthropology, structuralism has also cut across sociology, history, philosophy, psychiatry, criticism, the comparative study of arts and letters, classical studies, and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The present volume is a full record of the proceedings of an international symposium... Participating were many of the leading figures of the structuralist dialogue-Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Goldman, and the late Jean Hyppolite-and this is a useful demonstration of the movement, its aims and methods. Choice I have no doubt that, structuralist or not, anyone interested in literary critical theory or, more broadly, in the forms of human expressiveness will find the material presented here worth his attention. Books Abroad

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Book SynopsisThis anthology of primary materials-the words of American women writers on the act of authorship and their participation in the literary cultures of the nineteenth century- offers revealing insight into Hawthorne's "damned mob of scribbling women."Trade Review"A important addition to our library of nineteenth-century American women's writing, illuminating in their own voices their literary ambitions, frustrations, and triumphs." - Karen L. Kilcup, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro"

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Book SynopsisCinematic Illuminations offers medievalists, literary and cultural theorists, and film theorists and buffs a fresh approach to understanding how popular culture interprets and makes use of the past through the medium of film.Trade ReviewOne of the most refreshing aspects of this book is that Finke and Shichtman combine encyclopedic knowledge of and masterful control over their material-including but not limited to film studies, medieval literature and history, and popular culture-with nuanced analysis, deft prose, and a palpable enjoyment of the topic. The authors are clearly having a grand time and invite readers to join in. -- Mary K. Ramsey Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 2010 Through Finke and Shichtman's use of film theory and cinema criticism, along with their sensitive deployment of medieval historical and literary details, the Middle Ages emerges as a period production in this excellent and innovative study. -- Holly A. Crocker Speculum 2011Table of ContentsList of FiguresAcknowledgmentsPart 1: Theory and Methods of Cinematic Medievalism1. Traversing the Fantasy: Screening the Middle Ages2. Signs of the Medieval: A Sociological Stylistics of Film3. Celluloid History: Cinematic Fidelity and InfidelityPart 2: The Politics of Cinematic Medievalism4. Mirror of Princes: Representations of Political Authority in Medieval Films5. The Politics of Hagiography: Joan of Arc on the Screen6. The Hagiography of Politics: Mourning in America7. The Crusades: War of the Cross or God's Own Bloodbath?Part 3: Cinematic Medievalism and the Anxieties of Modernity8. Looking Awry at the Grail: Mourning Becomes Modernity9. Apocalyptic Medievalism: Rape and Disease as Figures of Social Anomie10. Forever Young: The Teen Middle AgesNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThe Fiction of Narrative traces the arc and evolution of White's field-defining thought and will become standard reading for students and scholars of historiography, the theory of history, and literary studies.Trade ReviewThe book will interest scholars from an array of disciplines... Recommended. ChoiceTable of ContentsEditor's NotePrefaceEditor's IntroductionAcknowledgments1. Collingwood and Toynbee: Transitions in English Historical Thought2. Religion, Culture, and Western Civilization in Christopher Dawson's Idea of History3. The Abiding Relevance of Croce's Idea of History4. Romanticism, Historicism, and Realism: Toward a Period Concept for Early Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History5. The Tasks of Intellectual History6. The Culture of Criticism: Gombrich, Auerbach, Popper7. The Structure of Historical Narrative8. What Is a Historical System?9. The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History10. The Problem of Change in Literary History11. The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation: Marx and Flaubert12. The Discourse of History13. Vico and Structuralist/Poststructuralist Thought14. The Interpretation of Texts15. Historical Pluralism and Pantextualism16. The "Nineteenth Century" as Chronotope17. Ideology and Counterideology in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism18. Writing in the Middle Voice19. Northrop Frye's Place in Contemporary Cultural Studies20. Storytelling: Historical and Ideological21. The Suppression of Rhetoric in the Nineteenth Century22. Postmodernism and Textual Anxieties23. Guilty of History? The longue durée of Paul RicoeurNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAnd discovering a usable American past, as Wyatt shows, enables us to confront the urgencies of our present moment.Trade ReviewA useful introduction to a broad canon of 20th-century authors, this book touches on important issues in literary-historical scholarship and uses clear, conversational language deliberately devoid of jargon; a distinctive feature of the discussion is Wyatt's pointed use of a first-person personal voice that blends his autobiographical insights with his critical readings... Highly recommended. Choice 2011Table of ContentsTo the ReaderAcknowledments1. The Body and the Corporation2. Double Consciousness3. Pioneering Women4. Performing Maleness5. Colored Me6. The Rumor of Race7. The Depression8. The Second World War9. Civil Rights10. Love and Separateness11. Revolt and Reaction12. The Postmodern13. Studying War14. Slavery and Memory15. Pa Not Pa16. After InnocenceA Personal NoteNotesWorks CitedIndex

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