Description
Book SynopsisNot only an accessible hands-on guide to writing criticism across the literary arts, the dramatic arts, and the narrative screen arts, but also a book that makes a case for how and why criticism matters today
Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts is a practical guide to engaging actively and productively with a critical object, whether a film, a novel, or a play. Going beyond the study of lyric poetry and literature to include motion picture and dramatic arts, this unique text provides specific advice on how to best write criticism while offering concrete illustrations of what it looks like on the page.
Divided into two parts, the book first presents an up-to-date account of the state of criticism in both Anglo-American and Continental contextsdescribing both the longstanding mission and the changing functions of criticism over the centuries and discussing critical issues that bridge the literary and screen arts in the contemporary world. The s
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Part I Critical Issues 1
Chapter 1 Doing Criticism/Doing without Criticism 3
1 Functions of Criticism 3
2 Two Thought Experiments 7
3 Limits of the Lyric Paradigm 12
4 Criticism in the Convenience Store 21
5 Criticism between Page and Screen 26
Chapter 2 Makings of the Critical Essay 36
1 Objects, Occasions, Frames of Reference 36
2 Criticism and the Essay Form 41
3 Critical Questions I 49
4 Critical Questions II 61
5 Critical Judgments 68
Part II Criticism in Practice 83
Chapter 3 Conversations 85
1 Beyond the Poem Itself 85
2 Coppola Sounds Out Hitchcock 97
3 Austen, Edgeworth, and the Moral Economy of the Novel 111
Chapter 4 Adaptations 127
1 Two-Way Street 127
2 Point of View in Fiction and Cinema: The Remains of the Day 137
3 Frankenstein and Its Adapted Progeny 154
Chapter 5 Genres 170
1 Laws of Genre 170
2 Satire across Media: Character and Impersonation 178
3 Melodrama across Media: Character and Personalization 198
Chapter 6 Conclusion: Authorship and Seriality— Spike Lee's Joints 217
1 Authorship, Seriality, and the Case of Spike Lee 217
2 Some Spike Lee Joints: Conversations and Adaptations 227
3 Crossing Genres in Bamboozled 251
Index 269
