The ten topics contained in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory reflect contemporary theoretical interests and guide the reader through fundamental questions, from the formation to the uses of theory, and from the construction to the interpretation of literature. The selected essays cover a wealth of scholarship from both the United States and Europe. They go beyond traditional categories by focusing on issues rather than writers or critical movements, thus providing a forum for the continuing discussion of what theory is and does.
A thoroughly revised edition of this successful undergraduate introduction to literary theory, this text includes core pieces by leading theorists from Russian Formalists to Postmodernist and Post-colonial critics. An ideal teaching resource, with helpful introductory notes to each chapter.
Twentieth. Century Literary Theory is an ideal introduction for the beginning reader. It includes 54 carefully selected and edited pieces, covering all the major critical approaches, from Russian formalism to contemporary developments such as Postcolonialism and New Pragmatism. As well as a general introduction, the editor provides an introduction to each theoretical approach covered, . putting the selected pieces in context. This new edition has been thoroughly revised and updated.
Undecidability is a fundamental quality of literature and constitutive of what renders some works appealing and engaging across time and in different contexts. This book explores the essential literary notion and its role, function and effect in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and literary theory. The book traces the notion historically, providing a map of central theories addressing interpretative challenges and recalcitrance in literature and showing ‘theory of uncertainty’ to be an essential strand of literary theory. While uncertainty is present in all literature, and indeed a prerequisite for any stabilisation of meaning, the Modernist period is characterised by a particularly strong awareness of uncertainty and its subforms of undecidability, ambiguity, indeterminacy, etc. With examples from seminal Modernist works by Woolf, Proust, Ford, Kafka and Musil, the book sheds light on undecidability as a central structuring principle and guiding philosophical idea in twentieth-century literature and demonstrates the analytical value of undecidability as a critical concept and reading-strategy. Defining undecidability as a specific ‘sustained’ and ‘productive’ kind of uncertainty and distinguishing it from related forms, such as ambiguity, indeterminacy and indistinction, the book develops a systematic but flexible theory of undecidability and outlines a productive reading-strategy based on the recognition of textual and interpretive undecidability.
The term "modernism" is central to any discussion of twentieth-century literature and critical theory. Astradur Eysteinsson here maintains that the concept of modernism does not emerge directly from the literature it subsumes, but is in fact a product of critical practices relating to nontraditional literature. Intervening in these practices, and correlating them with modernist works and with modern literary theory, Eysteinsson undertakes a comprehensive reexamination of the idea of modernism. Eysteinsson critically explores various manifestations of modernism in a rich array of American, British, and European literature, criticism, and theory. He first examines many modernist paradigms, detecting in them a conflict between modernism's culturally subversive potential and its relatively conservative status as a formalist project. He then considers these paradigms as interpretations-and fabrications-of literary history. Seen in this light, modernism both signals a historical change on the literary scene and implies the context of that change. Laden with the implications of tradition and modernity, modernism fills its major function: that of highlighting and defining the complex relations between history and postrealist literature. Eysteinsson focuses on the ways in which the concept of modernism directs our understanding of literature and literary history and influences our judgment of experimental and postrealist works in literature and art. He discusses in detail the relation of modernism to the key concepts postmodernism, the avant-garde, and realism. Enacting a crisis of subject and reference, modernism is not so much a form of discourse, he asserts, as its interruption-a possible "other" modernity that reveals critical aspects of our social and linguistic experience in Western culture. Comparatists, literary theorists, cultural historians, and others interested in twentieth-century literature and art will profit from this provocative book.
Theory After Theory provides an overview of developments in literary theory after 1950. It is intended both as a handbook for readers to learn about theory and an intellectual history of the recent past in literary criticism for those interested in seeing how it fits in with the larger culture. Accessible but rigorous, this book provides a wealth of historical and intellectual context that allows the reader to make sense of the movements in recent literary theory.
Considering The Great Popularity Of The First Four Editions Of The Book, Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, And Keeping In Mind The Valuable Suggestions Received From Several Quarters, The Present Fifth Edition Has Been Revised And Enlarged By An Addition Of Twelve New Chapters. It Contains Fifty Chapters In All, Organized Into Two Parts.Part I Of The Book Lays Emphasis On Various Schools Of Criticism That Are Prevalent In India And The West. Each Chapter Contains An Analysis Of The Theory In Question And Shows The Trend And Development As Well As The Methodology Of Literary Criticism In The 20Th Century. Recent Issues In Twentieth Century Criticism, Postcolonial Theory, Translation Theory, Cultural Criticism And Gender Studies Are Among The Many Attractions Of The Book.Part Ii Of The Book Contains Discussions On A Large Number Of Critical Essays And Critics Such As Eliot, Richards, Leavis, Barthes, Foucault And The Postcolonial Critics. The Seminal Critical Essays Included In This Section Have Influenced The Critical Trends In The Twentieth Century And Changed The General Perception Of Criticism. These Chapters, Apart From Giving A Comprehensive Idea Of The Critical Concepts Also Provide An Analytic Study Of The Critical Works. Important Postcolonial Critics Like Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Have Been Discussed With New Insight.Professor Das Has Explained The Theories And The Texts With Clarity And Precision In A Lucid Language. This Is An Invaluable Reference Book For Anyone Interested In The Field Of Literary Criticism In The Twentieth Century.
Schools and circles have been a major force in twentieth-century intellectual movements. They fostered circulation of ideas within and between disciplines, thus altering the shape of intellectual inquiry. This volume offers a new perspective on theoretical schools in the humanities, both as generators of conceptual knowledge and as cultural phenomena. The structuralist, semiotic, phenomenological, and hermeneutical schools and circles have had a deep impact on various disciplines ranging from literary studies to philosophy, historiography, and sociology. The volume focuses on a set of loosely interrelated groups, with a strong literary, linguistic, and semiotic component, but extends to the fields of philosophy and history--the interdisciplinary conjunctions arising from a sense of conceptual kinship. It includes chapters on unstudied or less studied groups, such as Tel Aviv School of poetics and semiotics or the research group Poetics and Hermeneutics. The volume presents a significant supplement to the standard historical accounts of literary, critical, and related theory in the twentieth century. It enhances and complicates our understanding of the twentieth-century intellectual and academic history by showing schools and circles in the state of germination, dialogue, controversy, or decline, in their respective historical and institutional settings, while reaching simultaneously beyond those dense settings to the new cultural and ideological situations of the twenty-first century.
The Unconcept is the first genealogy of the concept of the Freudian uncanny, tracing the development, paradoxes and movements of this negative concept through various fields and disciplines from psychoanalysis, literary theory and philosophy to film studies, genre studies, sociology, religion, architecture theory, and contemporary art. Anneleen Masschelein explores the vagaries of this 'unconcept' in the twentieth century, beginning with Freud's seminal essay 'The Uncanny,' through a period of conceptual latency, leading to the first real conceptualizations in the 1970s and then on to the present dissemination of the uncanny to exotic fields such as hauntology, the study of ghosts, robotics and artificial intelligence. She unearths new material on the uncanny from the English, French and German traditions, and sheds light on the specific status of the concept in contemporary theory and practice in the humanities. This essential reference book for researchers and students of the uncanny is written in an accessible style. Through the lens of the uncanny, the familiar contours of the intellectual history of the twentieth century appear in a new and exciting light.
