What Happens in Literature: A Student's Guide to Poetry, Drama, and FictionHow can we become good readers? In this classic handbook, Edward W. Rosenheim lays out the basics that can help us all become sharper, more proficient readers. Looking at specific poems, novels, and plays, this excellent critical guide raises questions and offers suggestions designed to make us think more and enjoy more fully what we are reading. Designed for students of literature as well as those who simply like to read, What Happens in Literature helps readers appreciate literary works as unique creations, born in a particular time and place, but powerful enough to speak across centuries. |
Contents
Aspect Seeing and the Uses of Criticism | 1 |
Meanings Speech Acts | 28 |
Writer and Reader | 59 |
Understanding and Misunderstanding | 96 |
Theories of Literature | 127 |
Evaluation | 173 |
Notes | 205 |
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Common terms and phrases
Aesthetics analogy answer argument assertion attitudes Beardsley behavior chapter characters claim coherence competence connotation consider context conventions course criticism Culler David Copperfield definition describing distinction E. D. Hirsch emotions essay evaluation example experience explain expression fact feelings fictional Frederick Crews function of literature Gulliver's Travels Hamlet Hirsch Houyhnhnms Huck Huck's Huckleberry Finn illocutionary act imagine intentions interpretation irony judgments Kermode kind language linguistic literary Lycidas meaning metaphor nature Noam Chomsky nonfiction notion novel object offer Othello passage Peckham perform Peripeteia perlocutionary acts play plot poem poetic poetry possible pretending Q. D. Leavis qualities question reader reasons referring regarded relationship response sense sentence simply situation someone sort speak speaker speech acts statements story structure suggest talking tell theory things tion true truth understanding University Press utterance Weitz word writing York Yvor Winters