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Approaching poems as utterances designed and packaged for pleasurable reanimation, How to Play a Poem leads readers through a course that uses our common experience of language to bring poems to life. It mobilizes the speech genres we acquire in our everyday exchanges to identify "signs of life" in poetic texts that can guide our co-creation of tone. How to Play a Poem draws on ideas from the Bakhtin School, usually associated with fiction rather than poetry, to construct a user-friendly practice of close reading as an alternative to the New Critical formalism that still shapes much of teaching and alienates many readers. It sets aside stock questions about connotation and symbolism to guide the playing out of dynamic relations among the human parties to poetic utterances, as we would play a dramatic script or musical score. How to Play a Poem addresses critics ready to abandon New Criticism, teachers eager to rethink poetry, readers eager to enjoy it, and students willing to give it a chance, inviting them to discover a lively and enlivening way to animate familiar and unfamiliar poems.
Rhetoric appears to be a marginal topic for the Bakhtin School and for most Bakhtin scholars, but many rhetorical critics, theorists, and teachers have nonetheless found the school’s work compelling and challenging. This book collects ten essays by Don Bialostosky focusing specifically on the ways that Bakhtin’s work conceptualizes and elaborates the functions of rhetoric, including dialogism, the art of discourse, poetics, carnivalesque, and much more.
Wordsworth's poetry has been a focus for many of the theoretical schools of criticism that comprise modern literary studies. Don Bialostosky here proposes to adjudicate the diverse claims of these numerous schools and to trace their implications for teaching. Bialostosky draws on the work of Bakhtin and his followers to create a 'dialogic' critical synthesis of what Wordsworth's readers - from Coleridge to de Man - have made of his poetry. He reveals Wordsworth's poetry as itself 'dialogically' responding to its various contexts, and opens up fruitful possibilities for criticism and teaching of Wordsworth. This challenging book uses the case of Wordsworth studies to make a far-reaching survey of modern literary theory and its implications for the practice of criticism and teaching today.
. The contributors are Stephen C. Behrendt, Don H. Bialostosky, Jerome Christensen, Richard W. Clancey, Klaus Dockhorn, James Engell, David Ginsberg, Bruce E. Graver, Scott Harshbarger, Theresa M. Kelley, J. Douglas Kneale, John R. Nabholtz, Lawrence D. Needham, Marie Secor, Nancy S. Struever, Leslie Tannenbaum, and Susan J. Wolfson.
Lisa Fishman’s Current follows The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta, 2007) further into an experience of time as theater, weather, myth, insect body, plantlife, transcription, synchrony, and figment. Her poems are pressed into argument and song by means of attention to the moment and to cross-currents of making, of music, over time. Current enacts a poetics of the uncanny in very close touch with the actual, creating a field of vibrations in which the possibilities and limitations of vision and art collide and change.
A Companion to Rhetoric offers the first major survey in two decades of the field of rhetorical studies and of the practice of rhetorical theory and criticism across a range of disciplines. Assesses rhetoric’s place in the larger intellectual universe. Focuses on the practical side of rhetoric, looking at specific works, problems and figures. Provides examples of rhetoric from ancient times to the present day. Written by leading scholars from a variety of different fields.
The anti-sceptical relativism and self-conscious rhetoric of the pragmatist tradition, which began with the Older Sophists of Ancient Greece and developed through an American tradition including William James and John Dewey has attracted new attention in the context of late twentieth-century postmodernist thought. At the same time there has been a more general renewal of interest across a wide range of humanistic and social science disciplines in rhetoric itself: language use, writing and speaking, persuasion, figurative language, and the effect of texts. This book, written by leading scholars, explores the various ways in which rhetoric, sophistry and pragmatism overlap in their current theoretical and political implications, and demonstrates how they contribute both to a rethinking of the human sciences within the academy and to larger debates over cultural politics.
Widely considered the standard history of the profession of literary studies, Professing Literature unearths the long-forgotten ideas and debates that created the literature department as we know it today. In a readable and often-amusing narrative, Gerald Graff shows that the heated conflicts of our recent culture wars echo—and often recycle—controversies over how literature should be taught that began more than a century ago. Updated with a new preface by the author that addresses many of the provocative arguments raised by its initial publication, Professing Literature remains an essential history of literary pedagogy and a critical classic. “Graff’s history. . . is a pathbreaking investigation showing how our institutions shape literary thought and proposing how they might be changed.”— The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
In his earlier Rhetorical Power, Steven Mailloux presented an innovative and challenging strategy for combining critical theory and cultural studies. That book has stimulated wide-ranging discussion and debate among diverse audiences—students and specialists in American studies, speech communications, rhetoric/composition, law, education, biblical studies, and especially literary theory and cultural criticism. Reception Histories marks a further development of Mailloux's influential critical project, as he demonstrates how rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. Reception Histories works out in detail what rhetorical hermeneutics means in terms of poststr...
Relying on the author’s established expertise in rhetorical theory and political communication, this book re-contextualizes Romantic rhetorical theory in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to provide a foundation for a Neo-Romantic rhetorical theory for our own time. In the process, it uses a unique methodology to correct misconceptions about many Romantic writers. The methodology of the early chapters uses a dialectical approach to trace Romanticism and its opposition, the Enlightenment, back through Humanism and its opposition, Scholasticism, to St. Augustine. These chapters include a revisionist analysis of the church’s treatment of Galileo in the course of showing how difficult i...