Close Reading: The ReaderFrank Lentricchia, Andrew DuBois An anthology of exemplary readings by some of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics, Close Reading presents a wide range of responses to the question at the heart of literary criticism: how best to read a text to understand its meaning. The lively introduction and the selected essays provide an overview of close reading from New Criticism through poststructuralism, including works of feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, new historicism, and more. From a 1938 essay by John Crowe Ransom through the work of contemporary scholars, Close Reading highlights the interplay between critics—the ways they respond to and are influenced by others’ works. To facilitate comparisons of methodology, the collection includes discussions of the same primary texts by scholars using different critical approaches. The essays focus on Hamlet, “Lycidas,” “The Rape of the Lock,” Ulysses, Invisible Man, Beloved, Jane Austen, John Keats, and Wallace Stevens and reveal not only what the contributors are reading, but also how they are reading. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois’s collection is an essential tool for teaching the history and practice of close reading. Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Andrew DuBois, Stanley Fish, Catherine Gallagher, Sandra Gilbert, Stephen Greenblatt, Susan Gubar, Fredric Jameson, Murray Krieger, Frank Lentricchia, Franco Moretti, John Crowe Ransom, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Helen Vendler |
From inside the book
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... political " ) modes of reading . The headings of the two major sec- tions are meant to suggest that formalist critics are always interested in the vast world which lies outside literature and that the nonformalists who have domi- nated ...
... political . The arrangement of these selections is not meant to make claims about critical progress or regress ; it is , however , meant to assert that a genuine ( perhaps the central ) debate in twentieth - century literary criticism ...
... political critics today might find themselves sympathetic to the ques- tion Brooks asks of the " Ode , " namely , " What is the relation of the beauty ( the goodness , the perfection ) of a poem to the truth or falsity of what it seems ...
... political critics as we earlier invoked . The essence of responsibility in Brooks is revealed in the recurrence of a certain kind of tran- sitional statement ( " If one attends closely . . . , " " Attended to with care hints at the love ...
... political commitment , but also from a readerly and writerly commitment , is an option raised glancingly by Roland Barthes in his little essay on a photo exhibition called " The Great Family of Man " : " Birth , death ? Yes , these are ...
Contents
1 | |
FORMALISM PLUS | 41 |
AFTER FORMALISM? | 195 |
Contributors | 381 |
Acknowledgment of Copyrights | 385 |
Index | 387 |