Critical Theory And The Literary Canon
Critical Theory And The Literary Canon

Author: E. Dean Kolbas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-03-09

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0429980825

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Kolbas stakes out new territory in assessing the war over literary canon formation, a subject that contemporary polemicists have devoted much ink to. Throughout this succinct manuscript, Kolbas ranges through the sociology and politics of culture, aesthetic theory, and literary theory to develop his point that texts not only must should be situated in the historical and material conditions of their production, but also evaluated for their very real aesthetic content. One reason the is an important issue, Kolbas contends, is that the canon is not simply enclosed in the ivory tower of academia; its effects are apparent in a much wider field of cultural production and use. He begins by critiquing the conservative humanist and liberal pluralist positions on the canon, which either assiduously avoid any sociological explanation of the canon or treat texts as stand-ins for particular ideologies. Kolbas is sympathetic to the arguments of Bourdieu et. al. regarding positioning the canon in a wider "field of cultural production" than the university, but argues that theirs are purely sociological explanations of aesthetics (i.e., there is no objective aesthetic content) that ignore art's autonomous realm, which he argues -- a la Adorno -- exists (if only problematically). Ultimately, he argues that critical theory, particularly the arguments of Adorno on aesthetics, offers the most fruitful path for evaluating the canon, despite the approach's clear flaws. His vision is a sociological one, but one that treats the components of the canon as possessing objective aesthetic content, albeit content that shifts in meaning over history.

The Role of the Literary Canon in the Teaching of Literature
The Role of the Literary Canon in the Teaching of Literature

Author: Robert Aston

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1000078922

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This book investigates the role of the idea of the literary canon in the teaching of literature, especially in colleges and secondary schools in the United States. Before the term "canon" was widely used in literary studies, which occurred in the second half of 20th century when the canon was first seriously viewed as politically and culturally problematic, the idea that some literary texts were more worthy of being studied than others existed since the beginning of the discipline of the teaching of literature in the 1800s. The concept of the canon, however, extends as far back as to Ancient Greece and its meaning has evolved over time. Thus, this book charts the changing meaning of the idea of the literary canon, examining its influence specifically in the teaching of literature from the beginning of the field to the 21st century. To explain how the literary canon and the teaching of literature have changed over time and continue to change, this book constructs a theory of canon formation based on the ideas of Michel Foucault and the assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda, illustrating that the literary canon, while frequently contested, is integral to the teaching of literature yet changes as the teaching of literature changes.

History, Literature, Critical Theory
History, Literature, Critical Theory

Author: Dominick LaCapra

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2013-05-15

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0801467764

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In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander's two-volume, prizewinning history Nazi Germany and the Jews. A recurrent motif of the book is the role of the sacred, its problematic status in sacrifice, its virulent manifestation in social and political violence (notably the Nazi genocide), its role or transformations in literature and art, and its multivalent expressions in "postsecular" hopes, anxieties, and quests. LaCapra concludes the volume with an essay on the place of violence in the thought of Slavoj Zizek. In LaCapra's view Zizek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence."

Critical Terms for Literary Study
Critical Terms for Literary Study

Author: Frank Lentricchia

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-05-15

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 0226472094

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Since its publication in 1990, Critical Terms for Literary Study has become a landmark introduction to the work of literary theory—giving tens of thousands of students an unparalleled encounter with what it means to do theory and criticism. Significantly expanded, this new edition features six new chapters that confront, in different ways, the growing understanding of literary works as cultural practices. These six new chapters are "Popular Culture," "Diversity," "Imperialism/Nationalism," "Desire," "Ethics," and "Class," by John Fiske, Louis Menand, Seamus Deane, Judith Butler, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, and Daniel T. O'Hara, respectively. Each new essay adopts the approach that has won this book such widespread acclaim: each provides a concise history of a literary term, critically explores the issues and questions the term raises, and then puts theory into practice by showing the reading strategies the term permits. Exploring the concepts that shape the way we read, the essays combine to provide an extraordinary introduction to the work of literature and literary study, as the nation's most distinguished scholars put the tools of critical practice vividly to use.

The Western Canon
The Western Canon

Author: Harold Bloom

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2014-06-17

Total Pages: 751

ISBN-13: 0547546483

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The literary critic defends the importance of Western literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Kafka and Beckett in this acclaimed national bestseller. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD Harold Bloom's The Western Canon is more than a required reading list—it is a “heroically brave, formidably learned” defense of the great works of literature that comprise the traditional Western Canon. Infused with a love of learning, compelling in its arguments for a unifying written culture, it argues brilliantly against the politicization of literature and presents a guide to the essential writers of the western literary tradition (The New York Times Book Review). Placing William Shakespeare at the “center of the canon,” Bloom examines the literary contributions of Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, Leo Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Pablo Neruda, and many others. Bloom's book, much-discussed and praised in publications as diverse as The Economist and Entertainment Weekly, offers a dazzling display of erudition and passion. “An impressive work…deeply, rightly passionate about the great books of the past.”—Michel Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

Vénus Noire
Vénus Noire

Author: Robin Mitchell

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2020-02-15

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0820354333

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Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

Cultural Capital
Cultural Capital

Author: John Guillory

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-10-24

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 0226830608

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An enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory’s formative text on the literary canon. Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge on which culture has long been based. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups and more as a question of the distribution of cultural capital in schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing. Now, as the crisis of the canon has evolved into the so-called crisis of the humanities, Guillory’s groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this enlarged edition: “Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation—these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.”

Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present
Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present

Author: Chris Baldick

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1317900987

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Presents a coherent and accessible historical account of the major phases of British and American Twentieth-century criticism, from 'decadent' aestheticism to feminist, decontsructonist and post-colonial theories. Special attention is given to new perspectives on Shakesperean criticism, theories of the novel and models of the literary canon. The book will help to define and account for the major developments in literary criticism during this century exploring the full diversity of critical work from major critics such as T S Eliot and F R Leavis to minor but fascinating figures and critical schools. Unlike most guides to modern literary theory, its focus is firmly on developments within the English speaking world.

Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature
Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature

Author: J.P. Sullivan

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-07-17

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 9004329269

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In recent decades the study of literature in Europe and the Americas has been profoundly influenced by modern critical theory in its various forms, whether Structuralism or Deconstructionism, Hermeneutics, Reader-Response Theory or Rezeptionsästhetik, Semiotics or Narratology, Marxist, feminist, neo-historical, psychoanalytical or other perspectives. Whilst the value and validity of such approaches to literature is still a matter of some dispute, not least among classical scholars, they have had a substantial impact on the study both of classical literatures and of the mentalité of Greece and Rome. In an attempt to clarify issues in the debate, the eleven contributors to this volume were asked to produce a representative collection of essays to illustrate the applicability of some of the new approaches to Greek and Latin authors or literary forms and problems. The scope of the volume was deliberately limited to literary investigation, broadly construed, of Greek and Roman authors. Broader areas of the history and culture of the ancient world impinge in the essays, but are not their central focus. The volume also contains a separate bibliography, offering for the first time a complete bibliography of classical studies which incorporate modern critical theory.

Critical Theory and the Novel
Critical Theory and the Novel

Author: David Bruce Suchoff

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780299140847

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A study of the historical origins of cultural criticism in the novel since the mid-19th century, using the critical theory of the Frankfurt School to declare the critical force of mass culture as crucial to the making of the modern novel. Discusses how mass audiences and politics presented problems to major novelists and how they responded in their writings and lives. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR