Download or read book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory written by Galin Tihanov and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the 1940s, when awareness of Russian Formalism began to spread, literary theory remained almost exclusively a Russian and Eastern European invention. The Birth and Death of Literary Theory tells the story of literary theory by focusing on its formative interwar decades in Russia. Nowhere else did literary theory emerge and peak so early, even as it shared space with other modes of reflection on literature. A comprehensive account of every important Russian trend between the world wars, the book traces their wider impact in the West during the 20th and 21st centuries. Ranging from Formalism and Bakhtin to the legacy of classic literary theory in our post-deconstruction, world literature era, Galin Tihanov provides answers to two fundamental questions: What does it mean to think about literature theoretically, and what happens to literary theory when this option is no longer available? Asserting radical historicity, he offers a time-limited way of reflecting upon literature—not in order to write theory's obituary but to examine its continuous presence across successive regimes of relevance. Engaging and insightful, this is a book for anyone interested in theory's origins and in what has happened since its demise.
Download or read book Biography in Theory written by Wilhelm Hemecker and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook is an anthology of significant theoretical discussions of biography as a genre and as a literary-historical practice. Covering the 18th to the 21st centuries, the reader includes programmatic texts by authors such as Herder, Carlyle, Dilthey, Proust, Freud, Kracauer, Woolf and Bourdieu. Each text is accompanied by a commentary placing its contribution in critical context. Ideal for use in undergraduate seminars, this reader may also be of interest for academic researchers in the areas of literary studies and history aiming to get an overview of historical questions in biographical theory. This revised and updated English language edition also includes new translations of texts by J. G. Herder and Stefan Zweig, as well as an introductory discussion on the possibility of a ‘theory of biography’. Note: Due to copyright reasons, the chapter "Sade, Fourier, Loyola [Extract] (1971)" (pp. 175–177) by Roland Barthes could not be included in the ebook.
Download or read book An Analysis of Roland Barthes s The Death of the Author written by Laura Seymour and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay, "The Death of the Author," argues against the traditional practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author into textual interpretation because of the resultant limitations imposed on a text. Hailing "the birth of the reader," Barthes posits a new abstract notion of the reader as the conceptual space containing all the text’s possible meanings. The essay has become one of the most cited works in literary criticism and is a key text for any reader approaching reader response theory.
Download or read book Theory of Literature written by Rene Wellek and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mikhail Bakhtin written by Mikhail Bakhtin and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This annotated book is a first English translation of 12-hours of interviews of Victor Duvakin with Mikhail Bakhtin recorded in 1973. From Freud to Kant, from the French Symbolists to the German Romantics, Bakhtin shares his knowledge and appreciation of various Western European authors and thinkers. As a result, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, invites us to reconsider the importance of Western art and thought to Bakhtin himself, and Russian culture in general.
Download or read book Death Representations in Literature written by Adriana Teodorescu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-12 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the academic field of death studies is a prosperous one, there still seems to be a level of mistrust concerning the capacity of literature to provide socially relevant information about death and to help improve the anthropological understanding of how culture is shaped by the human condition of mortality. Furthermore, the relationship between literature and death tends to be trivialized, in the sense that death representations are interpreted in an over-aestheticized manner. As such, this approach has a propensity to consider death in literature to be significant only for literary studies, and gives rise to certain persistent clichés, such as the power of literature to annihilate death. This volume overcomes such stereotypes, and reveals the great potential of literary studies to provide fresh and accurate ways of interrogating death as a steady and unavoidable human reality and as an ever-continuing socio-cultural construction. The volume brings together researchers from various countries – the USA, the UK, France, Poland, New Zealand, Canada, India, Germany, Greece, and Romania – with different academic backgrounds in fields as diverse as literature, art history, social studies, criminology, musicology, and cultural studies, and provides answers to questions such as: What are the features of death representations in certain literary genres? Is it possible to speak of an homogeneous vision of death in the case of some literary movements? How do writers perceive, imagine, and describe their death through their personal diaries, or how do they metabolize the death of the “significant others” through their writings? To what extent does the literary representation of death refer to the extra-fictional, socio-historically constructed “Death”? Is it moral to represent death in children’s literature? What are the differences and similarities between representing death in literature and death representations in other connected fields? Are metaphors and literary representations of death forms of death denial, or, on the contrary, a more insightful way of capturing the meaning of death?
Download or read book The Origins of Russian Literary Theory written by Jessica Merrill and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian Formalism is widely considered the foundation of modern literary theory. This book reevaluates the movement in light of the current commitment to rethink the concept of literary form in cultural-historical terms. Jessica Merrill provides a novel reconstruction of the intellectual historical context that enabled the emergence of Formalism in the 1910s. Formalists adopted a mode of thought Merrill calls the philological paradigm, a framework for thinking about language, literature, and folklore that lumped them together as verbal tradition. For those who thought in these terms, verbal tradition was understood to be inseparable from cultural history. Merrill situates early literary theories within this paradigm to reveal abandoned paths in the history of the discipline—ideas that were discounted by the structuralist and post-structuralist accounts that would emerge after World War II. The Origins of Russian Literary Theory reconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. According to these theories, literary form is always a product of human psychology and cultural history. By recontextualizing Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism’s legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.
Download or read book The Varieties of Authorial Intention written by John Farrell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the logic and historical origins of a strange taboo that has haunted literary critics since the 1940s, keeping them from referring to the intentions of authors without apology. The taboo was enforced by a seminal article, “The Intentional Fallacy,” and it deepened during the era of poststructuralist theory. Even now, when the vocabulary of “critique” that has dominated the literary field is under sweeping revision, the matter of authorial intention has yet to be reconsidered. This work explains how “The Intentional Fallacy” confused different kinds of authorial intentions and how literary critics can benefit from a more up-to-date understanding of intentionality in language. The result is a challenging inventory of the resources of literary theory, including implied readers, poetic speakers, omniscient narrators, interpretive communities, linguistic indeterminacy, unconscious meaning, literary value, and the nature of literature itself.
Download or read book A Theory of Literary Production written by Pierre Macherey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is more important: the reader, or the writer? Originally published in French in 1966, Pierre Macherey‘s first and most famous work, A Theory of Literary Production dared to challenge perceived wisdom, and quickly established him as a pivotal figure in literary theory. The reissue of this work as a Routledge Classic brings some radical ideas to
Download or read book A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism written by Evgeny Dobrenko and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2011-11-27 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travelers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the cultural revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with official ideology. The chapters follow theory and criticism into the 1930s with examinations of the Union of Soviet Writers, semantic paleontology, and socialist realism under Stalin. A more "humanized" literary criticism appeared during the ravaging years of World War II, only to be supplanted by a return to the party line, Soviet heroism, and anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period. During Khrushchev's Thaw, there was a remarkable rise in liberal literature and criticism, that was later refuted in the nationalist movement of the "long" 1970s. The same decade saw, on the other hand, the rise to prominence of semiotics and structuralism. Postmodernism and a strong revival of academic literary studies have shared the stage since the start of the post-Soviet era. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in emigre literary theory and criticism.
Download or read book The Biography of the Idea of Literature written by Adrian Marino and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1996-12-12 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "idea of literature" is the very kernel of every literary study; however, this is the first survey of the historical development of this idea. Its purpose is to refute the belief, particularly prevalent in French criticism, that the "idea of literature" only appeared in the eighteenth century, and that it was perceived strictly as an art.
Download or read book Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes written by Roland Barthes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1977, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is the great literary theorist's most original work—a brilliant and playful text, gracefully combining the personal and the theoretical to reveal Roland Barthes's tastes, his childhood, his education, his passions and regrets.
Download or read book Literary Theory and Criticism An Introduction written by Anne H. Stevens and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction provides an accessible overview of major figures and movements in literary theory and criticism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. It is designed for students at the undergraduate level or for others needing a broad synthesis of the long history of literary theory. An introductory chapter provides an overview of some of the major issues within literary theory and criticism; further chapters survey theory and criticism in antiquity, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth century. For twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory, the discussion is subdivided into separate chapters on formalist, historicist, political, and psychoanalytic approaches. The final chapter applies a variety of theoretical concepts and approaches to two famous works of literature: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Download or read book Literature in the Dawn of Sociological Theory written by Sarah Louise MacMillen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-11-17 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature in the Dawn of Sociological Theory: Stories That Are Telling focuses on a selection of novelists from the early 1800s to the early 1900s and their connections to the insights of Classical Sociological Theory and the sociological imagination. This monograph also considers the aesthetic, sociological, and literary insights of Theodor Adorno, György Lukács, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Wolf Lepenies, Franco Moretti, Lucien Goldmann, and John Orr. The main chapters discuss the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The concluding chapter reflects on the dawn of modernity, especially the birth of capitalism and the plague crisis via Boccaccio’s Florence, significant to The Decameron. Throughout the text, Sarah Louise MacMillen considers these “stories that are telling” in light of social issues today. She presents a case for highlighting the authors of the past, wherein these fictional accounts anticipate some of our contemporary social problems and social movements. These dynamics include the environmental crisis, the effects of globalization, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, “cancel culture,” debates about gender nonconformity, and secularization. Finally, MacMillen reflects on the need for solidarity in shifting patterns of social existence and rebuilding post-COVID.
Download or read book Literary Theory An Introduction Anniversary Ed written by Terry Eagleton and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bourdieu and Literature written by John R. W. Speller and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2011 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bourdieu and Literature is a wide-ranging, rigorous and accessible introduction to the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu's work and literary studies. It provides a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of his contributions to literary theory and his thinking about authors and literary works. One of the foremost French intellectuals of the post-war era, Bourdieu has become a standard point of reference in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, art history, cultural studies, politics, and sociology, but his longstanding interest in literature has often been overlooked. This study explores the impact of literature on Bourdieu's intellectual itinerary, and how his literary understanding intersected with his sociological theory and thinking about cultural policy. This is the first full-length study of Bourdieu's work on literature in English, and it provides an invaluable resource for students and scholars of literary studies, cultural theory and sociology.
Download or read book Anatomy of Criticism written by Northrop Frye and published by . This book was released on 2002-03 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
