Download or read book In Defence of Literary Interpretation written by Ken M Newton and published by Springer. This book was released on 1986-10-29 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Language Truth and Literature written by Richard Gaskin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Gaskin offers an original defence of literary humanism, according to which works of imaginative literature have an objective meaning which is fixed at the time of production and not subject to individual readers' responses. He shows that the appreciation of literature is a cognitive activity fully on a par with scientific investigation.
Download or read book Sidney s The Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism written by Gavin Alexander and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2004-02-26 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversy raged through England during the 1570-80s as Puritans denounced all manner of games & pastimes as a danger to public morals. Writers quickly turrned their attention to their own art and the first & most influential response came with Philip Sidney's Defense. Here he set out to answer contemporary critics &, with reference to Classical models of criticism, formulated a manifesto for English literature. Also includes George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy, Samuel Daniel's Defence of Rhyme, & passages by writers such as Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon & George Gascoigne.
Download or read book Fiction Agonistes written by Gregory Jusdanis and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this path-breaking new work, Gregory Jusdanis asks why literature matters. Why are we afraid to admit our pleasures of reading, to defend the arts to the school board, to discuss the importance of literature in life? Drawing on a wealth of references from Aristophanes to Eudora Welty, from Fernando Pessoa to Orhan Pamuk, from Cavafy to hypertext stories, Jusdanis reminds us that the arts have always been under attack. Instead of despair, however, he offers a pragmatic defense of literature, arguing that it performs a social function in dramatizing the break between illusion and reality, life and the life-like, permanence and metamorphosis. The ability to distinguish between the actual and the imaginary is essential to human beings. Our capacity to imagine something new, to project ourselves into the mind of another person, and to fight for a new world is based on this distinction. Literature allows us to imagine alternate possibilities of human relationships and political institutions, even in the watery world of the Internet. At once daring and lucid, Fiction Agonistes considers the place of art today with passion and optimism.
Download or read book Literature Against Philosophy Plato to Derrida written by Mark Edmundson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book argues that the institutionalisation of literary theory, particularly within American and British academic circles, has led to a sterility of thought which ignores the special character of literary art. Mark Edmundson traces the origins of this tendency to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, in which Plato took the side of philosophy; and he shows how the work of modern theorists - Foucault, Derrida, de Man and Bloom - exhibits similar drives to subsume poetic art into some 'higher' kind of thought. Challenging and controversial, this book should be read by all teachers of literature and of theory, and by anyone concerned about the future of institutionalised literary studies.
Download or read book Literary Theory and Criticism written by Patricia Waugh and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a comprehensive account of modern literary criticism, presenting the field as part of an ongoing historical and intellectual tradition. Featuring thirty-nine specially commissioned chapters from an international team of esteemed contributors, it fills a large gap in the market by combining the accessibility of single-authored selections with a wide range of critical perspectives. The volume is divided into four parts. Part One covers the key philosophical and aesthetic origins of literary theory, while Part Two discusses the foundational movements and thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century. Part Three offers introductory overviews of the most important movements and thinkers in modern literary theory, and Part Four looks at emergent trends and future directions.
Download or read book In Defence of Realism written by Raymond Tallis and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Defence of Realism is a powerful indictment of the fog of bad philosophy and worse linguistics that has shrouded much contemporary literary theory and criticism. Raymond Tallis, one of the most important critics of post-Saussurean literary theory in the English-speaking world, examines the reasons often cited by critics and theorists for believing that realism in fiction is impossible and verisimilitude a mere literary ?effect.? He clearly demonstrates not only that the arguments of critics hostile to realism are invalid, but that even if they were sound, they would apply equally to anti-realist fiction, indeed to all intelligible discourse.
Download or read book In Defence of Fantasy written by Ann Swinfen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern fantasy novel might hardly seem to need a defence, but its position in contemporary literature in the 1980s was still rather ambivalent. Many post-war writers had produced highly successful fantasy novels, some phenomenal publishing successes had occurred in the field, and an increasing number of universities throughout the English-speaking world now included the literary criticism of fantasy as part of their English Literature courses. None the less some critics and academics condemned the whole genre with a passion that seemed less than objectively critical. In this book, originally published in 1984, Dr Ann Swinfen presents a wide-ranging and comprehensive view of fantasy: what it is, what it tries to achieve, what fundamental differences distinguish it from mainstream realist fiction. She concentrates on the three decades from 1945, when a new generation of writers found that Tolkein had made fantasy ‘respectable’. Her approach is thematic, rather than by individual author, and she brings out the profound moral purpose that underlies much modern fantasy, in a wide range of works, both British and American, such as Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child, C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy.
Download or read book A Defense of Judgment written by Michael W. Clune and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-23 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teachers of literature make judgments about value. They tell their students which works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, or insightful—and thus, which are more worthy of time and attention than others. Yet the field of literary studies has largely disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are inevitably rooted in prejudice or entangled in problems of social status. For several decades now, professors have called their work value-neutral, simply a means for students to gain cultural, political, or historical knowledge. ?Michael W. Clune’s provocative book challenges these objections to judgment and offers a positive account of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic education. It is impossible, Clune argues, to separate judgments about literary value from the practices of interpretation and analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise. Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment, transcending consumer culture and market preferences. Drawing on psychological and philosophical theories of knowledge and perception, Clune advocates for the cultivation of what John Keats called “negative capability,” the capacity to place existing criteria in doubt and to discover new concepts and new values in artworks. Moving from theory to practice, Clune takes up works by Keats, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Bernhard, showing how close reading—the profession’s traditional key skill—harnesses judgment to open new modes of perception.
Download or read book An Apologie for Poetrie 1595 written by Philip Sidney and published by . This book was released on 1869 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism Volume 3 The Renaissance written by George Alexander Kennedy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1999 volume was the first to explore as part of an unbroken continuum the critical legacy both of the humanist rediscovery of ancient learning and of its neoclassical reformulation. Focused on what is arguably the most complex phase in the transmission of the Western literary-critical heritage, the book encompasses those issues that helped shape the way European writers thought about literature from the late Middle Ages to the late seventeenth century. These issues touched almost every facet of Western intellectual endeavour, as well as the historical, cultural, social, scientific, and technological contexts in which that activity evolved. From the interpretative reassessment of the major ancient poetic texts, this volume addresses the emergence of the literary critic in Europe by exploring poetics, prose fiction, contexts of criticism, neoclassicism, and national developments. Sixty-one chapters by internationally respected scholars are supported by an introduction, detailed bibliographies for further investigation and a full index.
Download or read book Monsieur written by Lawrence Durrell and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the olive trees of southern France to Gnostic cults in Egypt, a man and his lovers are invented and reinvented in this first volume of a great literary adventure. For British doctor Bruce Drexel, a return to Provence is bittersweet. Here, at a rustic chateau, he once fell in love with Sylvie, the Frenchwoman who would become his wife, and befriended her brother, Piers. The three made up a peculiar, potent ménage for years until Sylvie’s descent into madness and Piers’s suicide. As Drexel attends to Piers’s affairs, he becomes steeped in the memories of a spiritually transformational trip to Egypt; the band of intellectual confederates who used to be his intimate friends; and a three-sided love that became his reason for being. So begins Monsieur, the masterful first entry of Durrell’s Avignon Quintet, an infinite regress of memory and imagination that challenges the formal conventions of fiction.
Download or read book The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism 1917 1930 written by Marián Gálik and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-18 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1980, is a history of modern Chinese literary criticism between the years 1917 and 1930. It examines its development within the overall frame of reference of Chinese national literature from the beginnings of the Chinese literary revolution in 1917 until the end of the first efforts at a revolutionary proletarian literature in 1930. Chinese literary criticism is also analysed within the framework of world literature, of world literary thought, especially of the impact of the progressive literary criticism.
Download or read book In Defence of T S Eliot written by Craig Raine and published by Macmillan Pub Limited. This book was released on 2001-10-12 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His pieces, on the literary world and some of its most fascinating figures and classics, bear his hallmark of vitality and distinctive approach. Raine’s knowledge of the span of literary theory (and anecdote) and the incisiveness of his thinking uncover as far more contradictory and complex in their successes writers customarily held in reverence. The essays range from a powerful piece on the KGB’s literary archive to thoughts about tragedy in Kipling’s life, from Auden, Nabokov and Beckett to the state of health of Samuel Johnson’s testicles. This book celebrates the diversity of the world of books and Raine is a supremely entertaining and thought-provoking guide. ‘Raine pounces on writers lacking his own high degree of linguistic resolution and independence. The citizenly impulse behind these arresting critical interventions is usually commendable. One gets the impression of a man simmering in long silence, coming reluctantly to the boil because someone has to speak up’ Geoff Dyer, Guardian
Download or read book Literature Interpretation and Ethics written by Colin Davis and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature, Interpretation and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value and values of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study. Hermeneutics is the endeavor to understand the nature of interpretation, as it poses vital questions about how we make sense of works of art, our own lives, other people and the world around us. The book outlines the contribution of hermeneutics to literary study through detailed accounts of role of interpretation in the work of key thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It also illustrates problems of interpretation posed by specific literary texts and films, emphasising how our interpretive acts also entail ethical engagements. The book develops a ‘hermeneutics of (guarded) trust’, which calls for attention to the agency of art without surrendering critical vigilance. Through a series of forays into theoretical texts, literary works and films, the book contributes to contemporary debates about critical practice and the cultural value. Interpretation, it suggests, is always fallible but it is also essential to our place in the world, and to the importance of the humanities.
Download or read book American Audacity In Defense of Literary Daring written by William Giraldi and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most gifted literary essayists of his generation defends stylistic boldness and intellectual daring in American letters. Over the last decade William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist, “a literature-besotted Midas of prose” (Cynthia Ozick). Now, American Audacity gathers a selection of his most powerful considerations of American writers and themes—a “gorgeous fury of language and sensibility” (Walter Kirn)—including an introductory call to arms for twenty-first-century American literature, and a new appreciation of James Baldwin’s genius for nonfiction. With potent insights into the storied tradition of American letters, and written with a “commitment to the dynamism and dimensions of language,” American Audacity considers giants from the past (Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harper Lee, Denis Johnson), some of our most well-known living critics and novelists (Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Katie Roiphe, Cormac McCarthy, Allan Gurganus, Elizabeth Spencer), as well as those cultural-literary themes that have concerned Giraldi as an American novelist (bestsellers, the “problem” of Catholic fiction, the art of hate mail, and his viral essay on bibliophilia). Demanding that literature be audacious, and urgent in its convictions, American Audacity is itself an act of intellectual daring, a compendium shot through with Giraldi’s “emboldened and emboldening critical voice” (Sven Birkerts). At a time when literature is threatened by ceaseless electronic bombardment, Giraldi argues that literature “must do what literature has always done: facilitate those silent spaces, remain steadfastly itself in its employment of slowness, interiority, grace, and in its marshaling of aesthetic sophistication and complexity.” American Audacity is ultimately an assertion of intelligence and discernment from a maker of “perfectly paced prose” (The New Yorker), a book that reaffirms the pleasure and wisdom of the deepest literary values.
Download or read book J W H Atkins on Literary Criticism written by J. W. H. Atkins and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-30 with total page 1601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published between 1934 and 1952 these volumes are classics in the field of literary criticism. Their author was a respected scholar whose ability to survey a vast field of literature and criticism and explain and un-tangle it to students was well-known. The volumes: Analyze styles of literary criticism prevalent in ancient Greece and after the rise of the Roman Empire Illustrates the first phases of the growth of a tradition of criticism Review the critical achievement at the Renaissance Discuss the theories and judgments of various critics and their bearing on literary appreciation between the Renaissance and the dawn of 19th Century Romanticism.
