Spenser is a delirious poet. He can’t plough straight. What he builds is shiftier, twistier , than anything dreamed up or put down by M. C. Escher.
So begins Resisting Allegory , in which the leading ...Spenser critic of our time sums up a lifelong commitment to the theory and practice of textual interpretation. Spenser’s great poem provides the occasion for a searching and comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration of reading practices¾those the author advocates as well as those he adapts or criticizes in entertaining a wide range of critical arguments with his celebrated combination of intellectual generosity and rigorous questioning.
Berger is interested in how details of the poem's language—phrases, images, figures on which we haven’t put enough interpretive pressure—disconcert traditional interpretations and big discourses that the poem has often been thought to serve. Central to this volume is an attention to the deployment of gender in conjunction with the Berger’s notion of narrative complicity.
Resisting Allegory offers a model of theoretically sophisticated criticism that never wavers in its close attention to the text. Berger offers a sustained and brilliantly articulated resistance not only to allegory, as the title indicates, but also to prevalent modes of cultural and historical criticism. As in all of Berger’s books, a lucid reflection on questions of method—based on a profound and richly theoretically informed understanding of the workings of language and of the historical situations of the people involved in it—are interwoven with an interpretive practice that serves as an exemplary pedagogical model. Berger attends to historical and political context while deeply respecting the ways in which text can never be reduced to context.
This distinctive and original book makes clear the scope and coherence of the critical vision elaborated Berger has elaborated in a lifetime of seminal and still-challenging critical arguments.
This book focuses on seven of the most important formal methods used to interpret the New Testament today. Several of the chapters also touch on Old Testament/Hebrew Bible interpretation. In line ...with the multiplicity of methods for interpretation of texts in the humanities in general, New Testament study has never before seen so many different methods. This situation poses both opportunities and challenges for scholars and students alike. The articles in this book introduce the latest methods and give examples of these methods at work. The seven methods are as follows: post-colonial, narrative, historical, performance, mathematical analysis of style; womanist; and ecological.
Can literature heal? The Poetics of Palliation argues that our answers to this question have origins in the Romantic period. In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and ...medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature cures by making sufferers whole again. But this model oversimplifies how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. Poetics documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley explored palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.
This paper attempts to concentrate on reclamation of African-American heritage in Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976) in the light of postmodern approaches. Reed represents a full spectrum of ...approaches to postmodern historical writing today, from the traditionally "realistic" to the radically anachronistic. Although Reed shares in the belief that history is textual and, therefore, available to him as material for his novel, he has very particular concerns for his brand of postmodern historical fiction, and the novel itself exemplifies diverse attitudes towards history. Keywords: Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada, History, African-American, Postmodern, Reclamation
This essay will try to go back over the complex history of the concept of form, although its subject may often turn out to be unthinkable or unspeakable. In literary critcism the formalist approach ...is based on a double trend: on the one hand a widespread mistrust in the power of language to communicate and to represent reality, on the other, the beginnings of a formalist approach in art history, - in Burkhardt, Wörringer, Wölfflin - leading to an art history `without names' and giving rise in turn to a formalist approach in literary criticism. There are close connections between The New Critics of the thirties and fifties in the United States and in England and the French Nouvelle Critique, both of which ended up reinforcing the tenets of the various modernist avant-gardes: impersonality, the autonomy of the work of art and the literary specificity of a literary text. While underlining the ambiguities emerging from the original term - form covers both the sense of eidos-idea and hule-matter, the essay ends up acknowledging the current demise of formalist criticism.
The first part of this article identifies major problems facing college English in Taiwan, including declining enrollment, reduced funding, and widespread contingent hiring, linking them to similar ...problems associated with the humanities crisis in the United States. The second examines selected writing on these problems in the United States, including writing on pedagogy associated with the New Criticism, which until the 1990s was the main approach to literary studies in Taiwan. The third reflects on how commentary on English in the United States might apply in the Taiwanese context, with focus on the material value of an English degree and the potential expansion of the degree beyond the isolated major.
Alfred Kazin and Poetry Kazin, Cathrael
Society (New Brunswick),
12/2018, Letnik:
55, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Both memoir and literary criticism, this piece by Alfred Kazin’s daughter describes her father’s relationship to poetry through the lens of musicality. She suggests that what drove Alfred Kazin’s ...writing on poetry was not argumentation but rather what he himself called a “terrible and pulsating musical sense,” capable of vanquishing lifelong feelings of isolation and loneliness.
Throughout his career as a literary critic, Alfred Kazin wrote often and with sympathy and insight about Theodore Dreiser, one of the most powerful, panoramic, and compassionate novelists in American ...literary history. Kazin was an intense reader and writer, committed in his books, essays, and reviews to connecting with and describing the personality of each author he examined. His interpretive work on Dreiser illuminates what it means to be a
literary
critic and teacher. When we read Kazin in the midst of twenty-first century theory, ideology, and professionalism, we realize all the more clearly the goal in his literary criticism that he aimed for, achieved, and represented—and that now is missing from literary education and experience.
Amid competing claims about who first developed the theories and practices that became known as New Criticism - the critical method that rose alongside Modernism - literary historians have generally ...given the lion's share of credit to William Empson and I.A. Richards. In The Birth of New Criticism Donald Childs challenges this consensus and provides a new and authoritative narrative of the movement's origins. At the centre stand Robert Graves and Laura Riding, two poet-critics who have been written out of the history of New Criticism. Childs brings to light the long-forgotten early criticism of Graves to detail the ways in which his interpretive methods and ideas evolved into the practice of "close reading," demonstrating that Graves played such a fundamental part in forming both Empson's and Richards's critical thinking that the story of twentieth-century literary criticism must be re-evaluated and re-told. Childs also examines the important influence that Riding's work had on Graves, Empson, and Richards, establishing the importance of this long-neglected thinker and critic. A provocative and cogently argued work, The Birth of New Criticism is both an important intellectual history of the movement and a sharply observed account of the cultural politics of its beginnings and legacy.
PDF
