In this detective novel set in a small, intense seminar, eight students study what their professor regards as the central mystery of human nature: the uniqueness of the individual. One morning a woman student who has been fighting this idea and disrupting the seminar keels over, poisoned. The detective who takes charge is himself a writer who finds this tight little world of academic criticism and theory fascinating, baffling, yet somehow sympathetic. Together he and the professor explore the minds and writings of the people in the seminar in order to track the murderer, then another body is found, pointing them in a different direction.
Together he and the professor explore the minds and writings of the people in the seminar in order to track the murderer, then another body is found, pointing them in a different direction.
Norman Holland was unquestionably the leading 20th-century American psychoanalytic literary critic. Long known as the Dean of American psychoanalytic literary critics, Holland produced an enormous body of scholarship that appeals to both neophytes in the field and advanced researchers, many of whom have been influenced by his writings. Holland was one of the first proponents of reader-response criticism, the theorist of readers' identity themes, and the author of fifteen books that have become classics in the field. Jeffrey Berman analyzes all of Holland's books, and many of his 250 scholarly articles, highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the critic's thinking over time. A controversial if not polarizing figure, Holland is discussed in relation to his closest colleagues, including Murray Schwartz, Bernard Paris, and Leslie Fiedler, as well as his fiercest critics, among them Frederick Crews, David Bleich, and Jonathan Culler, creating a dynamic and personal portrait. Insofar as this text illuminates the evolving mind of a premier literary critic, it produces a parallel profile of the American reader, the primary object of Holland's extensive work.
Provides librarians and library managers with information on how to start and maintain a fiction collection, offering guidelines, procedures, and interviews with professionals. Tells how to select materials, how to build a collection using suggestions from patrons, how to use book reviews as criteria for selection, and how to make use of WLN conspectus software to decide what selections are most marketable. Also lists sources, such as specific databases, for collecting specific genres. For librarians at public and academic libraries.
This topical study examines the 'novelizations' of radical literary theory in the work of A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Umberto Eco, John Fowles, Richard Powers and many other leading novelists. It offers a comprehensive analysis of the 'post-theoretical novel', and traces an alternative history of the 'theory revolution' in recent literary fiction.
During the past decade, Jeffrey Berman has published widely on the pedagogy of personal writing. In Diaries to an English Professor (1994), he explored the ways in which undergraduate students can use psychoanalytic diaries to deal with conflicted issues in their lives. Surviving Literary Suicide (1999) investigated how graduate students respond to novels and poems that portray and sometimes glorify self-inflicted death. And in Risky Writing (2002), Berman considered the ways teachers can encourage college students to write safely on a wide range of subjects often deemed too personal or too dangerous for the classroom, from grieving the loss of a friend to confronting sexual abuse. on understanding the other can transform the experience of learning. Berman begins with a discussion of several well-known stories and films featuring literature instructors who exert a formative influence on their students, including Good-bye, Mr. Chips, The Blackboard Jungle, Up the Down Staircase, and Dead Poets Society. He then goes on to examine the pedagogical importance of empathy, trauma, and forgiveness in helping students cope with the ordinary and extraordinary challenges of everyday life. powerful, insightful, authentic essays about lived experience that reveal both intellectual and emotional growth. In the book's final chapter, Berman considers the risks and benefits of empathic teaching, demonstrating how teachers can play a therapeutic role in the classroom without being therapists. Teachers who are regarded as trusting, supportive, and dependable, he argues, become attachment figures, influencing students to be more sensitive to and connected with their classmates' lives. Or, as Berman succinctly puts it, empathic teaching leads to empathic learning, an education for life.
A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.
Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story—the history of which encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King—that ends with a question rather than an answer. The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity. As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the "metaphysical detective story," in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world. Detecting Texts includes an introduction by the editors that defines the metaphysical detective story and traces its history from Poe's classic tales to today's postmodernist experiments. In addition to the editors, contributors include Stephen Bernstein, Joel Black, John T. Irwin, Jeffrey T. Nealon, and others.
This is the first bibliography of Postmodernism to take account of work published in all subject areas and in all languages. Deborah Madsen has identified a new first occurrence of the term in 1926, preceding by more than twenty years the first occurence documented by the Oxford English Dictionary. In a chronological listing, books, articles, notes, letters and working papers on Postmodernism are described with full bibliographical details. Reviews of major books are documented and full contents listings are given for special issues of journals devoted to Postmodernism. An appendix includes books on Postmodernism announced for publication in 1995. This bibliography brings together in one place all secondary material published on Postmodernism. All disciplines are included, from anthropology to zoology: architecture, cultural studies, dance, drama, feminism, fiction, geography, history, legal studies, literary theory, mathematics, medicine, music, pedagogical theory, philosophy, photography and film, poetry, politics, religion, sociology, the visual and plastic arts, and others. The bibliography also documents items in a range of languages other than English: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Slovanian, Spanish, and the Scandinavian languages. Access to the information contained in the bibliography is made easy with a comprehensive index providing guidance according to author, subject, language, and key words. Postmodernism: A Bibliography, 1926-1994 is an essential reference text for anyone working in the area of contemporary culture studies.
Describes Delphi seminars, a teaching method developed by the authors during the 1970's at the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Designed primarily for the teaching of literature and the arts, the method can be applied to any subject at any level. The goal of the Delphi seminars is to engage students with the subject matter beginning with their personal experiences with the text.
