It includes Heather Dubrow, answering New Historicist accounts of country house ideology, J. Paul Hunter reclaiming attention to eighteenth-century couplet structures, and Garrett Stewart arguing for the comprehensive import of the local syntactic forms in syllepsis in Dickens. Ronald Levao recovers the ethical urgency behind stylistic individuation in Milton; Frances Ferguson reveals the ideology of character within Austen’s free indirect discourse; Franco Moretti traces the history of the clue as formal device in detective fiction; and Robert Kaufman shows how formal dynamics derived from Kant and Adorno animate some of the most disruptive contemporary poetry. The history of formalism is the topic of Catherine Gallagher’s meditation on the dialogue of form and time since Percy Shelley and of Virgil Nemoianu’s account of the political vicissitudes of form in the twentieth century. These wide-ranging critical interventions are introduced by Susan Wolfson’s reflections on form today and by Ellen Rooney’s polemical appeal to cultural theorists not to defeat their purposes by neglecting form.
Contributors. Heather Dubrow, Frances Ferguson, Catherine Gallagher, J. Paul Hunter, Robert Kaufman, Ronald Levao, Franco Moretti, Virgil Nemoianu, Ellen Rooney, Garrett Stewart
Alongside the young rebel, the contemporary concept of identity emerged in the 1950s. It was in that decade that “identity” was first used to define collective selves in the politicized manner that is recognizable today: in terms such as “national identity” and “racial identity.” Medovoi traces the rapid absorption of identity themes across many facets of postwar American culture, including beat literature, the young adult novel, the Hollywood teen film, early rock ‘n’ roll, black drama, and “bad girl” narratives. He demonstrates that youth culture especially began to exhibit telltale motifs of teen, racial, sexual, gender, and generational revolt that would burst into political prominence during the ensuing decades, bequeathing to the progressive wing of contemporary American political culture a potent but ambiguous legacy of identity politics.
Today genre studies are flourishing, and nowhere more vigorously perhaps than in the field of Renaissance literature, given the importance to Renaissance writers of questions of genre. These studies have been nourished, as Barbara Lewalski points out, by the varied insights of contemporary literary theory. More sophisticated conceptions of genre have led to a fuller appreciation of the complex and flexible Renaissance uses of literary forms.
The eighteen essays in this volume are striking in their diversity of stance and approach. Three are addressed to genre theory explicitly, and all reveal a concern with theoretical issues. The contributors are James S. Baumlin, Francis C. Blessington, Morton W. Bloomfield, Barbara J. Bono, Mary Thomas Crane, Heather Dubrow, Alastair Fowler, Marjorie Garber, Claudio Guillén, Ann E. Imbrie, John N. King, John Klause, Harry Levin, Earl Miner, Janel M. Mueller, Annabel Patterson, Robert N. Watson, and Steven N. Zwicker.
Explores reasons why the theoretical enterprise is blind to, or “resists,” the radical nature of reading, in six essays that offer a new level of critical and cultural understanding in reference to the works of Jauss, Riffaterre, Benjamin, and Bakhtin.
In a brilliant collection of essays, de Man explores his views, that, the resistance to theory is inherent in the theoretical enterprise itself, and the real debate is with its own methodological assumptions and possibilities.
“Indispensable. . . . There is resistance to ‘theory’ and also confusion about its status with reference to both philosophy and criticism.” -Frank Kermode, Columbia UniversityIn the glory days of high modernist formalism it was anathema to speak about the content of a work of art. Those days are gone, and critical practice now is largely thematic practice. A focus on the themes of literature informs feminist, new historicist, ethnic, and even second-generation deconstructionist approaches. However, such practice is not always recognized. The specter of theoretically impoverished positivism still haunts thematic analysis, making it the approach to literature that dare not speak its name. This volume brings together for the first time an international group of writers, critics, and theoreticians who have thought deeply about this issue.
How can we determine the theme of a given text? May the focus on form be the theme of a certain moment? Can the motif be understood as a formal category? What operations permit us to say that three or four texts constitute variants of the same theme? The contributors challenge the conventional dismissal of “merely” thematic approaches and offer the reader different ways of tackling the issue of what a piece of writing is “about.”
The work here comes out of such diverse intellectual traditions as Russian film theory, French phenomenology, Foucault, narratology, the Frankfurt School, intellectual history (Geistesgeschichte), psychoanalytic criticism, linguistics, ideological criticism, Proppian folklore studies, and computerized plot summary models. In addition to a collection of aphorisms from Plato to Robert Coover and a group of general and theoretical essays, this volume contains examples of practical engagement with such topics as literary history, Shakespeare, autumn poetry, anti-Semitism, fading colors, bachelors, Richard Wagner, and the Mexican Revolution. No comparable volume exists.
Contributors. William E. Cain, Wai-chee Dimock, Howard Horwitz, Gregory S. Jay, Steven Mailloux, John McWilliams, Susan Mizruchi, Donald E. Pease, Ivy Schweitzer, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Robert Weimann
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