Literary Criticism Idea And Act

34 essays om litteraturvidenskab og engelsk litteratur, udvalgt blandt afhandlinger, der blev forelæst ved The English Institute, Columbia University i årene 1939-1972.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary works. Though the founding text of speech act theory, J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, repeatedly expels literature from the domain of felicitous speech acts, literature is an indispensable presence within Austin's book. It contains many literary references but also uses as essential tools literary devices of its own: imaginary stories that serve as examples and imaginary dialogues that forestall potential objections. How to Do Things with Words is not the triumphant establishment of a fully elaborated theory of speech acts, but the story of a failure to do that, the story of what Austin calls a "bogging down." After an introductory chapter that explores Austin's book in detail, the two following chapters show how Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in different ways challenge Austin's speech act theory generally and his expulsion of literature specifically. Derrida shows that literature cannot be expelled from speech acts—rather that what he calls "iterability" means that any speech act may be literature. De Man asserts that speech act theory involves a radical dissociation between the cognitive and positing dimensions of language, what Austin calls language's "constative" and "performative" aspects. Both Derrida and de Man elaborate new speech act theories that form the basis of new notions of responsible and effective politico-ethical decision and action. The fourth chapter explores the role of strong emotion in effective speech acts through a discussion of passages in Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Austin. The final chapter demonstrates, through close readings of three passages in Proust, the way speech act theory can be employed in an illuminating way in the accurate reading of literary works.

This book is divided into five parts and covers: representation; subjectivity; form, structure and system; history and society; morality, class and ideology. Each part contains several thematic sections in which extracts from different writers and periods are juxtaposed. The study of literary theory has tended to concentrate on very recent developments. This volume, however, establishes both a sense of the continuities from Plato to the present day as well as the discontinuities. These are presented through comparisons and contrasts across the entire field of critical history.

This book offers foundations for a literary criticism which seeks to mediate between writers and readers belonging to different historical periods or social groupings. This makes it, among other things, a timely intervention in the postmodern "culture wars," though the theory put forward will be of interest not only to students of literature and culture, but also to linguists. Sell describes communication in general as strongly interactive, as very much affected by the disparate situationalities of "sending" and "receiving," yet as by no means completely determined by them. Seen this way, men and women are both social beings and individuals, capable of empathizing with sociohistorical formations which are alien to them, sometimes even to the extent of changing their own life-world. By treating literary activity as communicational in this same dynamic sense, Sell radically modifies the main paradigms of twentieth-century literary theory, casting much new light on questions of genre, interpretation, affect and ethics.

Volume 8 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism deals with the most influential and hotly debated areas of literary theory: those developing in Europe but having their main impact in the Anglo-American world of academic literary studies, whose course they have fundamentally redirected. The structuralism, poststructuralism, Russian formalism, semiotics, narratology, hermeneutics, phenomenology, reception theory, and speech act theory associated with European writers including Barthes, Todorov, Derrida, and Iser, are here described in the context of their original development, but with an eye also to their eventual influence; and the volume includes a reflective chapter by Richard Rorty on deconstruction. Incorporating full bibliographies, this volume engages systematically with the history of the twentieth century's most profound and extensive set of cross-cultural intellectual movements.

Through a series of short essays, Readings traces the consideration given to the act of close reading in literary criticism and theory over the last thirty years. Focusing on short passages from a number of critical works, including those by Barthes, Cixous, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan and J. Hillis Miller amongst others, the essays enact close readings of the trope of reading - its movements and performances in each of the passages in question - so as to offer a more detailed comprehension of the nature of reading, and the ways in which critical thinking has transformed our understanding of what it means to read. Readings addresses in a lively and engaging manner the varying rhythms and articulations made possible through the careful tracing of the process of critical reading which literary theory has made available.

An accessible and thorough introduction to literary theory and contemporary critical practice, this book is an essential resource for beginning students of literary criticism. Covers traditional approaches such as formalism and structuralism, as well as more recent developments in criticism such as evolutionary theory, cognitive studies, ethical criticism, and ecocriticism Offers explanations of key works and major ideas in literary criticism and suggests key elements to look for in a literary text Also applies critical approaches to various examples from film studies Helps students to build a critical framework and write analytically