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As literary theory has grown more influential, interdisciplinary and sophisticated, it has come to concern itself with a much greater range of issues and objects than those traditionally considered literary. It now addresses philosophy, history, psychology, politics and the media. Addressing a central and fundamental, but relatively neglected, issue in literary theory, this title seeks to recontextualise how theory has changed our understanding of literature and its questions by relating literature to the institution of the university, to ethical judgements and values, new media and computer technology and the nature of representative democracy.
Antoni Negri spells out the philosophical credo that inspired his radical renewal of Marxism and his compelling analysis of the modern state and the global economy by means of an inspiring reading of the challenging metaphysics of the 17th-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza.
This volume of conversation not only provides a succinct philosophical biography that highlights the wide range of Attridge's interests. It likewise foregrounds his energetic engagements with literary theory, poetics, and stylistics, as well as his reassessments of contemporary philosophy and literary ideas, specifically those pertaining to the work Jacques Derrida, James Joyce, and J. M. Coetzee. Readers will find in this book a wonderful balancing act as Attridge negotiates the dynamics between the orthodoxies of critical practice and the strategic interventions of deconstructive reading. This book, with an appendix of a chronological listing of Attridge's publications, is an accessible and provocative introduction to the ideas of one of the most brilliant critical voices and generous presences in literary studies in the Anglophone world.
This book consists of a series of essays that all turn around questions of the address of speech or writing. They argue and demonstrate that meaning is not just a matter of the active intention of a subject (for example, speaker, writer, or other signatory of a meaningful act) but also of its reception at another's address. The book's main concern is therefore with a theory of meaning and of action that is not centered on the intentional, self-conscious subject. The fifteen chapters explore this problematic within three broad areas: love, jealousy, and sexual difference; fiction or literature; and political or public discourse. The book engages principally with contemporary French thought and includes important new readings of work by Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Even after the upheavals wrought by Theory, literary criticism has generally ignored the act and experience of reading itself, proceeding as though something so fundamental to our experience of texts could be taken for granted. Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction draws on deconstruction and the thought of Jacques Derrida to explore the ways in which contemporary fiction engages with reading, its power, the elusive nature of its experience and the failures of understanding inherent in it. Along the way, the book proceeds through close readings of such authors as J.M. Coetzee, David Mitchell, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth.
An essential guide to understanding literary theory and criticism in the European tradition What is Literature? A Critical Anthology explores the most fundamental question in literary studies. ‘What is literature?’ is the name of a problem that emerges with the idea of literature in European modernity. This volume offers a cross-section of modern literary theory and reflects on the history of thinking about literature as a specific form. What is Literature? reveals how ideas of the literary draw on the foundations of Western thought in ancient Greece and Rome, charting the emergence of modern literature in the eighteenth century, and including selections from the present state of the art...
This volume investigates the changing definitions of the author, what it has meant historically to be an 'author', and the impact that this has had on literary culture. Andrew Bennett presents a clearly-structured discussion of the various theoretical debates surrounding authorship, exploring such concepts as authority, ownership, originality, and the 'death' of the author. Accessible, yet stimulating, this study offers the ideal introduction to a core notion in critical theory.
This book presents new ways of thinking about the historical, epistemological and institutional role of literature, and aims at providing a theoretically well-founded basis for what might otherwise be considered a relatively unfounded historical fact, i.e. that both literature and the teaching of literature hold a privileged position in many educational institutions. The contributors take their point of departure in the title of the volume and use narratological, historical, cognitive, rhetorical, postcolonial and political frameworks to pursue two separate but not necessarily related questions: Why literature? and, Why study? This collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses on literature as a medium among, and compared to, other media and includes essays on the physical and mental geography of literature, focusing on the consequences and values of its reading and studying.
Revised throughout, the book includes: a new introduction which focuses attention on what is specific to literature's treatment of the human (as epitomised by Shakespeare); a section drawing on new work on literary genres as different forms of engagement
A Taste for the Foreign examines foreignness as a crucial aesthetic category for the development of prose fiction from Jacques Amyot’s 1547 translation of The Ethiopian Story to Antoine Galland’s early eighteenth-century version of The Thousand and One Nights. While fantastic storylines and elements of magic were increasingly shunned by a neo-classicist literary culture that valued verisimilitude above all else, writers and critics surmised that the depiction of exotic lands could offer a superior source for the novelty, variety, and marvelousness that constituted fiction’s appeal. In this sense, early modern fiction presents itself as privileged site for thinking through the literary ...