Thomas Docherty
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183570
- eISBN:
- 9780191674075
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183570.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Dealing with literature from Shakespeare and Donne to Calvino, with philosophy from the medieval to the contemporary, with cinema from popular to art-film, and with political theory from Marx to ...
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Dealing with literature from Shakespeare and Donne to Calvino, with philosophy from the medieval to the contemporary, with cinema from popular to art-film, and with political theory from Marx to Lyotard, Baudrillard and Badiou, this book intervenes in all the major contemporary cultural debates to propose and practise a new criticism, whose theoretical foundations lie in postmodern ethics, ecopolitics, and an austere attention to the radical difficulties of art. The book is a response to a growing realization that modern criticism — even in its apparently oppositional forms — remains caught up within the limitations of a philosophy of identity. Consequently, the tacit purpose of existing critique is the self-legitimation of the subject of criticism, a solace gained only through the refusal of the encounter with the objects of criticism: art and the culture of sociality. The book argues that we must attend to the difficulty of aesthetic practices. The contention is that it is only through an attention to the radical otherness of the world outside consciousness that we will be able to arrive at a historical and materialist criticism. In making this claim, the book rehabilitates the questions of why we bother about art, and proposes new modes of critical engagement with contemporary culture.Less
Dealing with literature from Shakespeare and Donne to Calvino, with philosophy from the medieval to the contemporary, with cinema from popular to art-film, and with political theory from Marx to Lyotard, Baudrillard and Badiou, this book intervenes in all the major contemporary cultural debates to propose and practise a new criticism, whose theoretical foundations lie in postmodern ethics, ecopolitics, and an austere attention to the radical difficulties of art. The book is a response to a growing realization that modern criticism — even in its apparently oppositional forms — remains caught up within the limitations of a philosophy of identity. Consequently, the tacit purpose of existing critique is the self-legitimation of the subject of criticism, a solace gained only through the refusal of the encounter with the objects of criticism: art and the culture of sociality. The book argues that we must attend to the difficulty of aesthetic practices. The contention is that it is only through an attention to the radical otherness of the world outside consciousness that we will be able to arrive at a historical and materialist criticism. In making this claim, the book rehabilitates the questions of why we bother about art, and proposes new modes of critical engagement with contemporary culture.
Christopher Hanlon
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199937585
- eISBN:
- 9780199333103
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937585.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, Criticism/Theory
America’s England examines the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. writers, public intellectuals, politicians, and aesthetes encoded the political turmoil of antebellum America in ...
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America’s England examines the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. writers, public intellectuals, politicians, and aesthetes encoded the political turmoil of antebellum America in a transatlantic constellation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for antebellum Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, it locates many of the crisis points of 1830s, 40s, 50s, and 60s America in a broader cisatlantic struggle over transatlantic connection. Through engagement with contemporaneous renditions of English race, history, landscape aesthetics, transatlantic telecommunications, and free trade discourses, northern and southern partisans—abolitionists, Unionists, and slaveholders alike—re-imagined the terms of the conflict, forming a transatlantic surround for the otherwise irreducibly cisatlantic political struggles that would dissolve the Union in 1861. This re-conceptualization of sectional issues in transatlantic terms undermined the notion that white citizens of the United States formed a unified biological or cultural community, effectively polarizing the imagined ethnic and cultural bases of the American polity. Moreover, a continued reference to English historical, cultural, and political formations allowed public intellectuals and authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Gilmore Simms, John Pendleton Kennedy, Charles Sumner, and Henry Herbert, to situate an era of developing national acrimony along longer historical and transnational curves, forming an account of national crisis that situated questions of a domestic political bearing at transatlantic remove from northern and southern combatants.Less
America’s England examines the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. writers, public intellectuals, politicians, and aesthetes encoded the political turmoil of antebellum America in a transatlantic constellation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for antebellum Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, it locates many of the crisis points of 1830s, 40s, 50s, and 60s America in a broader cisatlantic struggle over transatlantic connection. Through engagement with contemporaneous renditions of English race, history, landscape aesthetics, transatlantic telecommunications, and free trade discourses, northern and southern partisans—abolitionists, Unionists, and slaveholders alike—re-imagined the terms of the conflict, forming a transatlantic surround for the otherwise irreducibly cisatlantic political struggles that would dissolve the Union in 1861. This re-conceptualization of sectional issues in transatlantic terms undermined the notion that white citizens of the United States formed a unified biological or cultural community, effectively polarizing the imagined ethnic and cultural bases of the American polity. Moreover, a continued reference to English historical, cultural, and political formations allowed public intellectuals and authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Gilmore Simms, John Pendleton Kennedy, Charles Sumner, and Henry Herbert, to situate an era of developing national acrimony along longer historical and transnational curves, forming an account of national crisis that situated questions of a domestic political bearing at transatlantic remove from northern and southern combatants.
John Batchelor (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182894
- eISBN:
- 9780191673917
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182894.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Is literary biography so widely read for popular, ‘prurient’ reasons, or for ‘reputable’ intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? How much can we know ...
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Is literary biography so widely read for popular, ‘prurient’ reasons, or for ‘reputable’ intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? How much can we know about a life, such as Shakespeare's, where the documentation is so scanty? In this revealing new work seventeen leading critics and professional biographers discuss a broad range of issues, including the relationships between biography and autobiography, the problems genre poses, and the literary biographer at work, together with authors, such as Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Huxley, Conrad, and Rochester.Less
Is literary biography so widely read for popular, ‘prurient’ reasons, or for ‘reputable’ intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? How much can we know about a life, such as Shakespeare's, where the documentation is so scanty? In this revealing new work seventeen leading critics and professional biographers discuss a broad range of issues, including the relationships between biography and autobiography, the problems genre poses, and the literary biographer at work, together with authors, such as Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Huxley, Conrad, and Rochester.
Peter D. McDonald
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198725152
- eISBN:
- 9780191792595
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198725152.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states ...
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Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations to UNESCO’s ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, it brings together a large group of legacy writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policymakers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. The second part of the book reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es’kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature’s place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today.Less
Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations to UNESCO’s ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, it brings together a large group of legacy writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policymakers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. The second part of the book reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es’kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature’s place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today.
Dipannita Datta
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198099994
- eISBN:
- 9780199085415
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099994.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Has the battle for equality solved problems of woman in society? Has the cry for woman’s emancipation from her degraded condition liberated women in India and in the world? This volume analyses the ...
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Has the battle for equality solved problems of woman in society? Has the cry for woman’s emancipation from her degraded condition liberated women in India and in the world? This volume analyses the life and works of one of the foremost Indian women writers, Ashapurna Devi (1905–1995), from the point of view of her as an author of an ex-colony, and the changes and stirrings of the new social order she saw as India moved from the colonial to the postcolonial times. While remaining sensitive to her feminist insights, it is underscored that the meaning of feminism within the Indian discourse needs to be expanded in terms of the particular social and political reality of the times. The volume, therefore, as it examines her trenchant critique on certain gendered assumptions prevalent in society, equally brings to the fore Ashapurna’s comprehensive understanding of men and women not as ‘opposing parties’. Expanding the meaning of feminism along the lines of human solidarity and hopes for future, by maintaining difference from exclusiveness and deference for a culture that transcends the male–female dichotomy, this study shows that feminism is a vibrant contemporary force in India. Through Ashapurna’s literary feminist activism this volume invites rethinking of Indian feminism as much as its praxis, which is not the rejection of patriarchal culture as a solution to the ‘women’s question’. In fact, feminism in the context of India that has its roots in the antahpur days is an advanced social and literary discourse on the empowerment of women.Less
Has the battle for equality solved problems of woman in society? Has the cry for woman’s emancipation from her degraded condition liberated women in India and in the world? This volume analyses the life and works of one of the foremost Indian women writers, Ashapurna Devi (1905–1995), from the point of view of her as an author of an ex-colony, and the changes and stirrings of the new social order she saw as India moved from the colonial to the postcolonial times. While remaining sensitive to her feminist insights, it is underscored that the meaning of feminism within the Indian discourse needs to be expanded in terms of the particular social and political reality of the times. The volume, therefore, as it examines her trenchant critique on certain gendered assumptions prevalent in society, equally brings to the fore Ashapurna’s comprehensive understanding of men and women not as ‘opposing parties’. Expanding the meaning of feminism along the lines of human solidarity and hopes for future, by maintaining difference from exclusiveness and deference for a culture that transcends the male–female dichotomy, this study shows that feminism is a vibrant contemporary force in India. Through Ashapurna’s literary feminist activism this volume invites rethinking of Indian feminism as much as its praxis, which is not the rejection of patriarchal culture as a solution to the ‘women’s question’. In fact, feminism in the context of India that has its roots in the antahpur days is an advanced social and literary discourse on the empowerment of women.
Scott MacDonald
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199388707
- eISBN:
- 9780199388745
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199388707.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Avant-Doc is a collection of in-depth interviews with filmmakers who work in the territory between documentary and what is usually called avant-garde film, either within particular films or over the ...
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Avant-Doc is a collection of in-depth interviews with filmmakers who work in the territory between documentary and what is usually called avant-garde film, either within particular films or over the life of filmmaking careers. The volume is organized in a rough chronology beginning with a scholar (Annette Michelson) whose writing and editing have bridged the gap between documentary and avant-garde film, and several filmmakers (Robert Gardner, Ed Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Nina Davenport) whose work was formative in the development of particular kinds of documentary and “avant-doc.” Several European filmmakers (Leonard Retel Helmrich, Michael Glawogger, Susana de Sousa Dias) provide a broader perspective on current avant-doc practice; then the volume pans across a wide range of recent accomplishments, including the work of filmmakers who have dealt with the personal in inventive ways: Jonathan Caouette, Paweł Wojtasik, Todd Haynes, Susana de Sousa Dias, Amie Siegel, Alex Olch, Jane Gillooly, Betzy Bromberg, and Godfrey Reggio. Avant-Doc concludes with a focus on Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) and the remarkable avant-docs that have been produced under its auspices. The influence of MIT’s Film Section and Harvard’s Film Study Center and Carpenter Center for the Arts (and more recently, the SEL) is a major focus of the volume, though the filmmakers interviewed and the films they discuss raise a wide range of issues that are relevant to filmmakers around the world. The book as a whole and each interview is contextualized by an introduction. Filmographies and bibliographies are included.Less
Avant-Doc is a collection of in-depth interviews with filmmakers who work in the territory between documentary and what is usually called avant-garde film, either within particular films or over the life of filmmaking careers. The volume is organized in a rough chronology beginning with a scholar (Annette Michelson) whose writing and editing have bridged the gap between documentary and avant-garde film, and several filmmakers (Robert Gardner, Ed Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Nina Davenport) whose work was formative in the development of particular kinds of documentary and “avant-doc.” Several European filmmakers (Leonard Retel Helmrich, Michael Glawogger, Susana de Sousa Dias) provide a broader perspective on current avant-doc practice; then the volume pans across a wide range of recent accomplishments, including the work of filmmakers who have dealt with the personal in inventive ways: Jonathan Caouette, Paweł Wojtasik, Todd Haynes, Susana de Sousa Dias, Amie Siegel, Alex Olch, Jane Gillooly, Betzy Bromberg, and Godfrey Reggio. Avant-Doc concludes with a focus on Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) and the remarkable avant-docs that have been produced under its auspices. The influence of MIT’s Film Section and Harvard’s Film Study Center and Carpenter Center for the Arts (and more recently, the SEL) is a major focus of the volume, though the filmmakers interviewed and the films they discuss raise a wide range of issues that are relevant to filmmakers around the world. The book as a whole and each interview is contextualized by an introduction. Filmographies and bibliographies are included.
Kent Puckett
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195332759
- eISBN:
- 9780199868131
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332759.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the ...
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While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.Less
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.
Jerome J. McGann
- Published in print:
- 1988
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198117506
- eISBN:
- 9780191670961
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117506.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
As well as exploring the fault-lines marking the various kinds of historical literary studies from the New Criticism to Post-Structuralism, this book develops a fully elaborated socio-historical ...
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As well as exploring the fault-lines marking the various kinds of historical literary studies from the New Criticism to Post-Structuralism, this book develops a fully elaborated socio-historical criticism for literary works. It achieves this by means of four special sets of investigations: into the relation between the so-called ‘autonomous’ poem and its political/historical contexts; into the relation of reception and history to literary interpretation; into the problems of canon and the characterisation of period; and, finally, into the ideological dimensions of both literary works and the criticism of such works. Whilst focusing largely on 19th-century works — among them those of Keats, Byron, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti — its arguments are applicable to literary studies in general, and its emphasis throughout is theoretical and methodological.Less
As well as exploring the fault-lines marking the various kinds of historical literary studies from the New Criticism to Post-Structuralism, this book develops a fully elaborated socio-historical criticism for literary works. It achieves this by means of four special sets of investigations: into the relation between the so-called ‘autonomous’ poem and its political/historical contexts; into the relation of reception and history to literary interpretation; into the problems of canon and the characterisation of period; and, finally, into the ideological dimensions of both literary works and the criticism of such works. Whilst focusing largely on 19th-century works — among them those of Keats, Byron, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti — its arguments are applicable to literary studies in general, and its emphasis throughout is theoretical and methodological.
Howard Felperin
- Published in print:
- 1986
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128960
- eISBN:
- 9780191671746
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128960.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The past two decades have seen swift and radical change in the way literature is perceived and taught in this country and abroad, as numerous new schools of theory have blossomed, particularly at ...
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The past two decades have seen swift and radical change in the way literature is perceived and taught in this country and abroad, as numerous new schools of theory have blossomed, particularly at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Cambridge. Intended as an introduction to these new theories, the book offers a balanced and lively overview that steers clear of technicalities as it explains, explores, and occasionally takes issue with the large movements that have followed the so-called ‘practical’ criticism of F. R. Leavis and others. It focuses on the major schools and figures of structuralism, Marxism, and deconstruction, giving a focus on the ideological and methodological issues involved.Less
The past two decades have seen swift and radical change in the way literature is perceived and taught in this country and abroad, as numerous new schools of theory have blossomed, particularly at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Cambridge. Intended as an introduction to these new theories, the book offers a balanced and lively overview that steers clear of technicalities as it explains, explores, and occasionally takes issue with the large movements that have followed the so-called ‘practical’ criticism of F. R. Leavis and others. It focuses on the major schools and figures of structuralism, Marxism, and deconstruction, giving a focus on the ideological and methodological issues involved.
David Shepherd
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198156666
- eISBN:
- 9780191673221
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198156666.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, Criticism/Theory
Although metafiction has been the subject of much critical and theoretical writing, this is the first full-length study of its place in Soviet literature. Focusing on metafictional works by Leonid ...
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Although metafiction has been the subject of much critical and theoretical writing, this is the first full-length study of its place in Soviet literature. Focusing on metafictional works by Leonid Leonov, Marietta Shaginyan, Konstantin Vaginov, and Veniamin Kaverin, it examines, within a broadly Bakhtinian theoretical framework, the relationship between their self-consciousness and their cultural and political context. The texts are shown to challenge notions about the nature and function of literature fundamental to both Soviet and Anglo-American criticism. In particular, although metafictional strategies may seem designed to confirm assumptions about the aesthetic autonomy of the literary text, their effect is to reveal the shortcomings of such assumptions. The texts discussed take us beyond conventional understandings of metafiction by highlighting the need for a theoretically informed account of the history and reception of Soviet literature in which the inescapability of politics and ideology is no longer acknowledged grudgingly, but is instead celebrated.Less
Although metafiction has been the subject of much critical and theoretical writing, this is the first full-length study of its place in Soviet literature. Focusing on metafictional works by Leonid Leonov, Marietta Shaginyan, Konstantin Vaginov, and Veniamin Kaverin, it examines, within a broadly Bakhtinian theoretical framework, the relationship between their self-consciousness and their cultural and political context. The texts are shown to challenge notions about the nature and function of literature fundamental to both Soviet and Anglo-American criticism. In particular, although metafictional strategies may seem designed to confirm assumptions about the aesthetic autonomy of the literary text, their effect is to reveal the shortcomings of such assumptions. The texts discussed take us beyond conventional understandings of metafiction by highlighting the need for a theoretically informed account of the history and reception of Soviet literature in which the inescapability of politics and ideology is no longer acknowledged grudgingly, but is instead celebrated.
