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This book examines the current debates about the curriculum in historical context and offers considerations for the future.
In Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word, Deborah Wyrick argues that modern Continental and American literary theory is "tantalizingly applicable to Swiftian texts." Its applicability, she writes, "stems from Swift's interest in and exploration of what are now though of as phenomenological, structuralist, poststructuralist, and new historicist concerns: how a life in language comes into being, how semiotic systems determine meaning, how texts open up their own systems to other texts and to multiple interpretations." Wyrick investigates Swift's confrontations with three theories of language current in his day, theories that locate meaning in the thing named, in the idea behind the word, or in th...
Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction has left a lasting impression on writers, scholars, and readers around the world.
"The book is a lively warts-and-all rendering of Princeton's rise, addressing such themes as discriminatory admission policies, the academic underperformance of many varsity athletes, and the controversial "bicker" system through which students have been selected for the University's private eating clubs."--BOOK JACKET.
This is a study of the famous controversy between Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, fellow explorers who quarreled over Speke's claim to have discovered the source of the Nile during their African expedition in 1857-59. Speke died of a gunshot wound, probably accidental, the day before a scheduled debate with Burton in 1864. Burton has had the upper hand in subsequent accounts. Speke has been called a “cad.” In light of new evidence and after a careful reading of duelling texts, Carnochan concludes that the case against Speke remains unproven-and that the story, as normally told, displays the inescapable uncertainty of historical narrative. All was fair in this love-war.
Liberal education has long been a fascination for scholars in a variety of disciplines and is closely associated with the idea of the educated person. Seen at one time as a matter for colleges and universities, over the years it has become central to the debate surrounding general education in high school and even the earlier grades. Yet so many and varied are the uses of the term 'liberal education' that the question arises of whether and how the idea is any longer a useful or helpful construct. In what way might it speak helpfully to educational challenges we face today? In what ways does it still speak helpfully to educational challenges we face today? In what ways might it be a guide as we search for a better way forward? These are the central questions that are addressed in this book. In doing so, the positions of three theorists—John Henry Newman, Mortimer J. Adler, and Jane Roland Martin—who have written about liberal education in a compelling way and from different perspectives are selected for close analysis. The analysis is built upon to fashion a new ideal of the educated person and a new theory of liberal education.
Published in the bicentennial year of Samuel Johnson's death, Johnson and His Age includes contributions by some of the nation's most eminent scholars of eighteenth-century literature. A section on Johnson's life and thought presents fresh analyses of Johnson's friendships with Mrs. Thrale and George Steevens, new information on Johnson's relations with Smollett and Thomas Hollis, a speculative essay on "Johnson and the Meaning of Life," and a provocative examination of "Johnson, Traveling Companion, in Fancy and Fact." Other essays reinterpret basic assumptions in Johnson's criticism and examine "The Antinomy of Style" in Augustan poetics, Hume's critique of criticism, and the broad Anglo-S...
In particular, Hume flatly denies the intellectual legitimacy of 'literary history' as it is commonly practised and attempts to disentangle such history from the practice of historicism. The final chapter is devoted to a cogent discussion of how archaeo-historicism relates to various forms of contemporary theory. Although addressed primarily to literary critics, this wide-ranging and bold work will be of interest to historians and cultural critics as well.
Brings together scholars who use literary interpretation and discourse analysis to read 18th-century British philosophy in its historical context. This work analyses how the philosophers of the Enlightenment viewed their writing; and, how their institutional positions as teachers and writers influenced their understanding of human consciousness.