Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism

Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism

Author: Barry Laga

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-09-21

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1351357476

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Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism is a completely fresh and innovative approach to teaching and learning literary theory: using short passages of theory to make sense of literary and cultural texts. It focuses on the key concepts that help readers understand literature and cultural events in new and provocative ways. Covering a wide variety of iconic and contemporary theorists, the book offers a broad chronological and global overview, including thirty passages from theorists such as Viktor Shklovsky, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Jean Baudrillard, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michel Foucault, Monique Wittig, and Eve Sedgwick. Built on the premise that scholars use theory pragmatically, Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism identifies problems, puzzles, and questions readers may encounter when they read a story, watch a film, or look at artwork. It explains, in detail, thirty concepts that help readers make sense of these works and invites students to apply the concepts to a range of writing and research projects. The textbook concludes by helping students read theory with an eye on finding productive passages and writing their own “theory chapter,” signaling a shift from student as critic to student as theorist. Used as a main text in introductory theory courses or as a supplement to any literature, film, theater, or art course, this book helps students read closely and think critically.


Perspective Criticism

Perspective Criticism

Author: Gary Yamasaki

Publisher: James Clarke & Company

Published: 2013-02-28

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 0227901703

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Perspective Criticism sets out a new and illuminating biblical methodology designed to help the reader of biblical narratives in which there is a character engaged in action but no explicit indication from the storyteller on how the action is to be evaluated. Gary Yamasaki argues that in these cases we are receiving cryptic guidance from the author through the narrative technique of point-of-view. In such cases the methodology of Perspective Criticism may be applied to reveal this abstruse guidance. Gary Yamasaki provides a series of frames of analysis within the theory of Perspective Criticism which may be applied to biblical stories: the spatial, psychological, informational, temporal, phraseological, and ideological perspectives. Because the majority of the point-of-view devices found in biblical narratives are also used in cinematic storytelling, the book includes accessible analyses of film scenes, providing pop-culture illustrations of the workings of the point-of-view perspective. Gary Yamasaki concludes by applying his method to two case studies: the New Testament story of Gamaliel, and the Old Testament story of Gideon. In his work Yamasaki creates a valuable foundation for the deeper understanding of biblical narrative, a gift to anyone who has struggled with the concealed messages that should be divined in biblical point-of-view narratives.


Literary Approaches to the Bible

Literary Approaches to the Bible

Author: Douglas Mangum

Publisher: Lexham Methods

Published: 2018-03-14

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781577996668

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Literary approaches to the Bible systematically presents the different ways of analyzing the text within its literary context. Highlighted sections and annotated bibliographies in each chapter create ease for reading and give a path for further study. -- from back cover resources.


Doing Things with Texts

Doing Things with Texts

Author: Meyer Howard Abrams

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 9780393307474

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"One of the most respected literary scholars alive, . . . Abrams stands for understanding and conciliation, calling for a kind of humanism that can embrace the good in all literary theories." --Washington Post


Theory of Literature

Theory of Literature

Author: Paul H. Fry

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-04-24

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0300183364

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Bringing his perennially popular course to the page, Yale University Professor Paul H. Fry offers in this welcome book a guided tour of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. At the core of the book's discussion is a series of underlying questions: What is literature, how is it produced, how can it be understood, and what is its purpose? Fry engages with the major themes and strands in twentieth-century literary theory, among them the hermeneutic circle, New Criticism, structuralism, linguistics and literature, Freud and fiction, Jacques Lacan's theories, the postmodern psyche, the political unconscious, New Historicism, the classical feminist tradition, African American criticism, queer theory, and gender performativity. By incorporating philosophical and social perspectives to connect these many trends, the author offers readers a coherent overall context for a deeper and richer reading of literature.


Literary Criticism and Theory

Literary Criticism and Theory

Author: Pelagia Goulimari

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-15

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1135053014

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This incredibly useful volume offers an introduction to the history of literary criticism and theory from ancient Greece to the present. Grounded in the close reading of landmark theoretical texts, while seeking to encourage the reader's critical response, Pelagia Goulimari examines: major thinkers and critics from Plato and Aristotle to Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Said and Butler; key concepts, themes and schools in the history of literary theory: mimesis, inspiration, reason and emotion, the self, the relation of literature to history, society, culture and ethics, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer theory; genres and movements in literary history: epic, tragedy, comedy, the novel; Romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. Historical connections between theorists and theories are traced and the book is generously cross-referenced. With useful features such as key-point conclusions, further reading sections, descriptive text boxes, detailed headings, and with a comprehensive index, this book is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching literary theory for the first time or unfamiliar with the scope of its history.


A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

Author: Raman Selden

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13:

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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.


Theory After Theory

Theory After Theory

Author: Nicholas Birns

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 2010-06-14

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1770482539

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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.


Critical Theory Today

Critical Theory Today

Author: Lois Tyson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-09-10

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 1136615563

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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.


Subjective Criticism

Subjective Criticism

Author: David Bleich

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2019-12-01

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 1421434962

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Originally published in 1981. The meaning and objectives of literature, argues David Bleich, are created by the reader, who depends on community consensus to validate his or her judgements. Bleich proposes that the study of English be consciously reoriented from a knowledge-finding to a knowledge-making enterprise. This involves a new explanation of language acquisition in childhood, a psychologically disciplined concept of linguistic and literary response, and a recognition of the intellectual authority of pedagogical communities to originate and establish knowledge. Amplifying his theoretical model with subjective responses drawn from his own classroom experience, Bleich suggests ways in which the study of language and literature can become more fully integrated with each person's responsibility for what he or she knows.