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Theory of Literature was born from the collaboration of Ren Wellek, a Vienna-born student of Prague School linguistics, and Austin Warren, an independently minded "old New Critic." Unlike many other textbooks of its era, however, this classic kowtows to no dogma and toes no party line. Wellek and Warren looked at literature as both a social product--influenced by politics, economics, etc.--as well as a self-contained system of formal structures. Incorporating examples from Aristotle to Coleridge, written in clear, uncondescending prose, Theory of Literature is a work which, especially in its suspicion of simplistic explanations and its distrust of received wisdom, remains extremely relevant to the study of literature today.
02 The most comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory from Plato to the present, with a highly praised critical apparatus, including introductions, headnotes, bibliographies, and glosses.
This book may be viewed not only as n post-Proppian, post-Greimassian reconstruction and theoretical advance but also as a neo-Proppian, neo-Greimassian remodelling of story logic leading to an integrated descriptive model which focuses, by design, on narrative semiotics as a branch of descriptive poetics. The investigation and the revision of the actantial model and the narrative schema are made concrete through multiple small narratives from literary fiction, specifically Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, a parable of Pascal, and a historical chronicle. The modifications which Therese Budniakiewicz proposes are turned, as it were, backward towards a theoretical foundation that is both re-found and re-founded, and what emerges is a methodology of textual analysis the scope of which extends to include hermeneutics and interpretation. At the same time, through the analysis the author makes of the 'contractual and communication events' and the central position she gives to the Sender and Receiver, the book is led to place emphasis on the social and interactional nature of discourse and, thereby, integrating the basics of narrative within the framework of law and society and justice. By putting the theory in perspective while carefully analyzing its premises and by consolidating a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary concepts crucial to narrative, Fundamentals of Story Logic will be welcomed by all students of fiction, narratology, and the classical Greimas.
What accounts for the power of stories to both entertain and illuminate? This question has long compelled the attention of storytellers and students of literature alike, and over the past several decades it has opened up broader dialogues about the nature of culture and interpretation. This third edition of the bestselling Essentials of the Theory of Fiction provides a comprehensive view of the theory of fiction from the nineteenth century through modernism and postmodernism to the present. It offers a sample of major theories of fictional technique while emphasizing recent developments in literary criticism. The essays cover a variety of topics, including voice, point of view, narration, sequencing, gender, and race. Ten new selections address issues such as oral memory in African American fiction, temporality, queer theory, magical realism, interactive narratives, and the effect of virtual technologies on literature. For students and generalists alike, Essentials of the Theory of Fiction is an invaluable resource for understanding how fiction works. Contributors. M. M. Bakhtin, John Barth, Roland Barthes, Wayne Booth, John Brenkman, Peter Brooks, Catherine Burgass, Seymour Chatman, J. Yellowlees Douglas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Wendy B. Faris, Barbara Foley, E. M. Forster, Joseph Frank, Joanne S. Frye, William H. Gass, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gérard Genette, Ursula K. Heise, Michael J. Hoffman, Linda Hutcheon, Henry James, Susan S. Lanser, Helen Lock, Georg Lukács, Patrick D. Murphy, Ruth Ronen, Joseph Tabbi, Jon Thiem, Tzvetan Todorov, Virginia Woolf
This accessible guide provides the ideal first step in understanding literary theory.
Critical Theory Today is the essential introduction to contemporary criticial theory. It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness. This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.
Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.
Unsurpassed as a text for upper-division and beginning graduate students, Raman Selden's classic text is the liveliest, most readable and most reliable guide to contemporary literary theory. Includes applications of theory, cross-referenced to Selden's companion volume, Practicing Theory and Reading Literature.