Contents
preface v
introduction 1
Part One
CLASSIC TEXTS IN LITERARY CRITICISM 23
Plato 25
Republic, Book X 30 Ion 38 From Phaedrus 46
❖ dialogue with plato 50
Leo Tolstoy: From What Is Art? 52
Aristotle 55
Poetics 59
Horace 82
The Art of Poetry 84
Longinus 95
From On the Sublime 97
Plotinus 109
On the Intellectual Beauty 111
Dante Alighieri 120
From the Letter to Can Grande della Scala 121
Christine de Pisan 124
From the Querelle de la Rose 126
Sir Philip Sidney 132
An Apology for Poetry 135
John Dryden 160
An Essay of Dramatic Poesy 163
Aphra Behn 189
An Epistle to the Reader from The Dutch Lover 192 Preface to The Lucky Chance 195
Alexander Pope 198
An Essay on Criticism 199
Samuel Johnson 210
The Rambler, No. 4 212 Rasselas, Chapter 10 215 From Preface to Shakespeare 216
David Hume 231
Of the Standard of Taste 234
❖ dialogue with david hume 245
Barbara Herrnstein Smith: From Contingencies of Value 245
Immanuel Kant 247
From Critique of Judgment 251
Mary Wollstonecraft 275
From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 277
Germaine de Staël 285
Essay on Fictions 287 On Women Writers 293
Friedrich von Schiller 298
From On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry 300
William Wordsworth 304
Preface to Lyrical Ballads 306
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 319
Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius 323 From Biographia Literaria 325
John Keats 330
From a Letter to Benjamin Bailey 331 From a Letter to George and Thomas Keats 333
Thomas Love Peacock 334
The Four Ages of Poetry 336
Percy Bysshe Shelley 344
A Defence of Poetry 346
❖ dialogue with percy bysshe shelley 364
Raymond Williams: The Romantic Artist from Culture and Society 364
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 369
Introduction to the Philosophy of Art 373
Ralph Waldo Emerson 384
The Poet 385
Karl Marx 397
The Alienation of Labor from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 400
Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions from The German Ideology 406 On Greek Art in Its Time from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 410
Matthew Arnold 412
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time 415 From The Study of Poetry 429
Friedrich Nietzsche 435
From The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music 439 On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense 452 From Twilight of the Idols 459
Henry James 462
The Art of Fiction 464
Oscar Wilde 476
The Decay of Lying 478
Sigmund Freud 497
From The Interpretation of Dreams 500 Creative Writers and Daydreaming 509 The “Uncanny” 514 Medusa’s Head 533
T. S. Eliot 534
Tradition and the Individual Talent 537
Carl Gustav Jung 542
On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry 544 The Principal Archetypes 554
W. E. B. Du Bois 565
On Double Consciousness from The Souls of Black Folk 567 Criteria of Negro Art 569
Mikhail Bakhtin 575
From Discourse in the Novel Heteroglossia in the Novel 578 From Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics 594
Virginia Woolf 596
Shakespeare’s Sister from A Room of One’s Own 599 Austen — Brontë — Eliot from A Room of One’s Own 602
Zora Neale Hurston 611
What White Publishers Won’t Print 613
Martin Heidegger 617
Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry 620
Edmund
From Dickens: The Two Scrooges from The Wound and the Bow 630
Kenneth Burke 639
Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats 642 Literature as Equipment for Living 651
F. R. Leavis 656
From The Great Tradition 658
Jean-Paul Sartre 665
Why Write? 668
Simone de Beauvoir 679
Myths: Of Women in Five Authors 682
J. L. Austin 685
Constatives and Performatives and Speech Acts: Locutionary, Illocutionary, Perlocutionary from How to Do Things with Words 687
Northrop Frye 697
The Archetypes of Literature 699
Erich Auerbach 708
Odysseus’s Scar 710
Hans-Georg Gadamer 724
The Elevation of the Historicality of Understanding to the Status of Hermeneutical Principle from Truth and Method 727
Susan Sontag 744
Against Interpretation 746
Part Two
CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN LITERARY CRITICISM 753
1. Formalisms:
Russian Formalism, New Criticism,
Neo-Aristotelianism
_________________________________________________
755
I. A. Richards 769
The Two Uses of Language and Poetry and Beliefs from Principles of Literary Criticism 770
Victor Shklovsky 780 Art as Technique 781
Vladimir Propp 791
Transformations of the Wondertale from The Morphology of the Folktale 791
Cleanth Brooks 803
From My Credo: Formalist Criticism 804 Irony as a Principle of Structure 805
❖ dialogue with cleanth brooks 813
R. S. Crane: From The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks 813
W. K. Wimsatt and
The Intentional Fallacy 817
2. Structuralism and Deconstruction ________________________________ 825
Ferdinand de Saussure 847
Nature of the Linguistic Sign 848 Binary Oppositions 851
Roman Jacobson 858
From Linguistics and Poetics 858
Claude Lévi-Strauss 865
The Structural Study of Myth 866
Roland Barthes 874
From Work to Text 875 Striptease from Mythologies 879 The Structuralist Activity 881 The Death of the Author 885
Paul de Man 888
Semiology and Rhetoric 888
❖ dialogue with paul de man 899
Michel Foucault 910
What Is an Author? 910
Jacques Derrida 920
Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences 921 The Father of Logos from Plato’s Pharmacy 932 Différance 938
Umberto Eco 956
The Myth of Superman 956
3. Reader-Response Theory __________________________________________ 968
Hans Robert Jauss 987
Horizons for
Wayne C. Booth 995
Control of Distance in Jane Austen’s Emma 995
Wolfgang Iser 1007
The
Norman N. Holland 1020
The Question: Who Reads What How? 1021
How to Recognize a Poem When You See One 1029
❖ dialogue with
James Phelan: From Data, Danda, and Disagreement 1037
Judith Fetterley 1041
Introduction to The Resisting Reader 1041
Peter Rabinowitz 1048
From Before
Elaine Scarry 1063
On Vivacity: The Difference Between Daydreaming and Imagining-Under-Authorial-Instruction from Representations 1064
Mark Turner 1082
Poetry: Metaphor and the Conceptual Context of Invention 1083
Lisa Zunshine 1094
Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness 1094
4. Psychoanalytic Theory And Criticism _____________________________ 1112
Jacques Lacan 1128
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience 1129 The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud 1135 The Meaning of the Phallus 1155
Harold Bloom 1161
A Meditation upon Priority 1162
Peter Brooks 1167
Freud’s Masterplot 1167
Laura Mulvey 1178
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 1178
Slavoj Zˇizˇek 1186
Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing 1187
5. Marxist Criticism ________________________________________________ 1204
Georg Lukács 1223
The Ideology of Modernism 1224
Walter Benjamin 1238
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 1239
Bertolt Brecht 1255
The Popular and the Realistic 1256
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer 1260
From The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception from Dialectic of Enlightenment 1261
Louis Althusser 1269
From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses 1270
Raymond Williams 1278
From Marxism and Literature 1278
Fredric Jameson 1296
From The Political Unconscious 1297
Terry Eagleton 1313
Categories for a Materialist Criticism 1314
6. New Historicism and Cultural Studies ____________________________ 1326
Michel de Certeau 1348
Walking in the City from The Practice of Everyday Life 1349
Michel Foucault 1363
Las Meninas from The Order of Things 1363
Clifford Geertz 1372
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 1373
Hayden White 1389
The Historical Text as Literary Artifact 1390
Pierre Bourdieu 1404
The Market in Symbolic Goods 1404
Stuart Hall 1410
Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms 1410
Nancy Armstrong 1424
Some Call It Fiction: On the Politics of Domesticity 1425
The Ecocritical Insurgency 1439
Stephen Greenblatt 1448
Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance 1449 King Lear and Harsnett’s “Devil-Fiction” 1451
❖ dialogue with stephen greenblatt 1454
Frank Lentricchia: From Ariel and the Police 1454
Meaghau Morris 1458
Things to Do with Shopping Centres 1458
John Guillory 1477
From Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation 1478
Laura Kipnis 1490
(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler 1491
7. Feminist Criticism ________________________________________________ 1508
Nina Baym 1525
Melodramas of Beset Manhood 1526
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar 1537
From Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship 1538
❖ dialogue with sandra m. gilbert and susan gubar 1551
Toril Moi: From Sexual/Textual Politics 1551
Annette Kolodny 1556
Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism 1556
Julia Kristeva 1569
Woman’s Time 1569
Jonathan Culler 1585
Reading as a Woman 1585
❖ dialogue between elaine showalter and terry eagleton 1597
Elaine Showalter: From Critical Crossdressing; Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year 1598
Terry Eagleton: A Response to Elaine Showalter 1604
Elaine Showalter: In Reply 1605
Barbara Smith 1606
Toward a Black Feminist Criticism 1606
8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory ________________________________ 1617
Michel Foucault 1633
From The History of Sexuality 1633
Monique Wittig 1643
One Is Not Born a Woman 1643
Hélène Cixous 1649
Laugh of the Medusa 1649
Guy Hocquenghem 1662
From Homosexual Desire 1662
Gayle Rubin 1669
The Traffic in Women: Etc 1670
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1689
From Between Men 1690 From Epistemology of the Closet 1693
Steven Kruger 1697
Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale 1698
Judith Butler 1713
Imitation and Gender Insubordination 1713
❖ dialogue with judith butler 1713
Martha Nussbaum: From The Professor of Parody 1725
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner 1727
Sex in Public 1728
Judith Halberstam 1740
An Introduction to Female Masculinity 1741
9. Postcolonialism and Ethnic Studies _______________________________ 1759
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari 1783
What is a Minor Literature? 1783
Chinua Achebe 1789
An Image of
Toni Morrison 1797
Black Matter(s) 1797
Edward W. Said 1807
From the Introduction to Orientalism 1807
Benedict Anderson 1820
The Origins of National Consciousness 1821
Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1826
Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship 1827
❖ dialogue between fredric jameson and aijaz ahmad 1835
Fredric Jameson: From
Gayatri Spivak 1842
Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism 1843
Gloria Anzaldua 1856
La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness 1856
Barbara Christian 1864
The Race for Theory 1865
❖ dialogue with barbara christian 1872
Michael Awkward: From Appropriative Gestures: Theory and Afro-American Literary Criticism 1873 Deborah McDowell: From Recycling: Race, Gender, and the Practice of Theory 1876
Homi K. Bhabha 1881
Signs Taken
for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside
Henry Louis Gates Jr. 1896
Writing, “Race,” and the Difference It Makes 1897
❖ dialogue with henry louis gates jr. and houston a baker jr. 1909
Henry
Louis Gates Jr.: From Preface to Blackness: Test and Pretext 1910
Rey Chow 1915
The Interruption of Referentiality: Poststructuralism and the Conundrum of Critical Multiculturalism 1916
10. Theorizing Postmodernism _______________________________________ 1927
Jean-Francois Lyotard 1940
Defining the Postmodern 1940
Jean Baudrillard 1942
From The Precession of Simulacra 1943
Jürgen Habermas 1953
Modernity versus Postmodernity 1954
Fredric Jameson 1962
Postmodernism and Consumer Society 1963
Donna Haraway 1973
A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century 1974
Linda Hutcheon 1998
Theorizing the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics 1999
Postmodern Blackness 2016
Cornel West 2021
Postmodernism and Black America 2021