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Although postmodernism has questioned the distinction between history and fiction, it has not weakened it. History is a discourse with necessary consequences. Since Plato its distinction from fiction has been recognized as a fundamental aspect of the social contract and, therefore, as a matter of life and death.The authority to designate what is real leads ultimately to the authority to decide when it is morally permissible to take a human life. Controversies as diverse as the historians' debate on the Holocaust and the feminist critique of pornography take as their starting point the need to resist those who would treat the past as a type of fiction that can be rewritten to further the aims of political or sexual oppression. ... Read more

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Ezra Pound, the poet called "the contemporary of our grandchildren," has exercised enormous influence on the development of American poetry and criticism. This impact on the world of letters is only grudgingly acknowledged today, since it comes from a poet tainted by fascism and anti-Semitism. This book follows the contours of our love for his poetics and hate for his politics, juxtaposing Pound's work to postmodern theory. The contrasts prevail: in the relation of language to reality, in the moral and political commitments, and in the vision of history. At the same time, Pound's poetic practices, particularly his collage techniques and "series of Englishes," overflowed his political ideology. It is this overflow that makes him so fascinating to intellectuals and the main reason we study his work with respect now. ... Read more

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Defining Modernism investigates the intellectual connections among three leading nineteenth-century European modernists-Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Richard Wagner.Through a close reading of Baudelaire's and Nietzsche's essays on art and culture, Wagner's role in the two writers' attempts to define the radically new concept of "modernism" is elucidated.Gogrf-Voorhees explores the affinity between the two writers, which emerges from a juxtaposition of their formulations of the idea of a fractured, contradictory modernity that at once embraces, scatters, and reevaluates an entire constellation of ideas, including romanticism, pessimism, decadence, and nihilism. ... Read more

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The postmodern notion of gaming as a legitimate method of philosophical inquiry opposes the either/or model of modern discourse.Modern and Postmodern Strategies outlines the key issues informing the debate between modern and postmodern thought and focuses on the postmodern contention that the universalizing strategies of modern thought are cognitively and morally wrong.This study uses a range of theorists to explore the implications of monism and pluralism.By using the work of the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the author demonstrates that literary texts can function alongside--and often illuminate--the philosophical arguments between modern and postmodern thought. ... Read more

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Over the past decade, Anglo-American notions of textual construction and editorial theory have begun major paradigm shifts. Many of the key emergent issues of Anglo-American debate--such as theories of versions--are already familiar in German theory. In other respects, including systematic reflection on the design and function of editorial apparatus, the German debate has already produced paradigms and procedures as yet unformulated in English.
Contemporary German Editorial Theory makes available for the first time in English ten major essays by seven German theorists, together with an original introductory meditation by Hans Walter Gabler, editor of the celebrated edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. The volume thus participates in the paradigm shift in editorial theory that has led both to theoretical reconception of the field and to groundbreaking practical results. Topics discussed include the distinction between historical record and editor's interpretation, the display of multiple versions, concepts of authorization and intention, and the relations of textual theory to approaches like deconstruction and semiotics. The book also includes suggestions for further reading in both languages and a glossary of technical terms.
Contributors are Hans Zeller, Miroslav Cervenka, Elisabeth Höpker-Herberg, Henning Boetius, Siegfried Scheibe, and Gerhard Seidel.
Bringing together the heretofore separate Anglo- American and German approaches will strengthen each separately and prepare the way for a new hybrid combining the advantages of both orientations. This book will interest not only students of Anglo-American or German literature, but all who study cultural construction and transmission.
Hans Walter Gabler is Professor of English Literature, University of Munich. George Bornstein is Professor of English, University of Michigan. Gillian Borland Pierce is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature, University of Michigan.
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A uniquely accessible guide to a difficult subject, A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism introduces students to the major trends in contemporary literary theory. Offering the breadth of information of a handbook and the examples of an anthology, it provides an invaluable alternative to the standard collections and shows students how literary theory really unfolds.

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Customer Reviews (1)

Fairly decent general intro book
Booker's _Introduction to Lit Theory and Criticism_ is a nice beginner text.It gives thorough overviews of major critical movements.This DOES NOT give you actual critical articles.It is an INTRODUCTION ONLY.The major theorectical movements of the 20th century are explained in detail.Overall, a very solid work. ... Read more

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Repetition, Difference, and Knowledge dialogues with novels, theatre, philosophy, and literary theory in order to explore how three thinkersSamuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuzeemploy repetition as a means with which to radically unsettle some of the most fundamental notions of the human experience (among them, time, presence, originality, and being). Due to its interdisciplinary scope and its focus on repetition as an epistemological concept, this book will attract a broad audience of academic specialists across the humanities from the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, French studies, and poststructural studies. Its simplicity of style, deliberate avoidance of complex jargon, and clarity of argumentparticularly when dealing with complicated theoretical ideas and textsalso makes it an invaluable tool for use in both graduate- and undergraduate-level literature and philosophy courses. Repetition, Difference, and Knowledge provides experienced and beginning scholars alike with greater insight into the works of Beckett, Derrida, and Deleuze and into the role that repetition has played and continues to play in determining how we read our world and come to meaning. ... Read more

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Important and Accessible
This book is the best literary criticism of any I have read. I enjoy being taught about something I am interested in, and Lentricchia is a great teacher. Not only can he teach, he can write in a way that is fantastically accessible to a person like me. He also can write such intellectual and academic criticism that it flat blows your head off, or rockets out so fast that neither I, nor even smart, old, Harold Bloom wouldn't get it. This book fits my bill. Enjoy. ... Read more

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Theorists, scholars, and critics usually consider literary works to be fixed objects, assuming that any variations in the text of a work should be stabilized, reduced, eliminated. John Bryant urges that these variations create valuable records of the interactions between the artist and society. Preprint revisions, revised editions, adaptations for film, and expurgations for children are among the many forms of flux that shape literary works and position them relative to their audiences. Fully understanding the life of a literary work in its cultural situation requires recognizing the fluidity of text, and the present work makes the first coherent theoretical, critical, and editorial approach to the study of revision.
The author develops his theory and its critical application drawing upon the example of Melville's Typee, using its various versions to present protocols for fluid text analysis. He shows how the mountain of scholarly material comprising the fluid text can be presented by a partnership of book and computer screen, in ways that offer new opportunities, insights,and pleasures for scholars and readers.
The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen is written in a clear and accessible style and will appeal to scholars and students in editorial theory, literary criticism and analysis, and anyone concerned with the information architecture of complex literary works in digital media.
John Bryant is Professor of English, Hofstra University. His most recent book is an edition of Melville's Tales, Poems, and Other Writings.
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Distinguished scholars discuss editorial theory and how it is applied across the humanities.
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No poet of the twentieth century has aroused more controversy than Ezra Pound, and no work by him has seemed more important or more problematic than The Cantos. A Poem Containing History offers nine new essays that examine Pound's major poem from a historical and contextual perspective, in which the work's textual development is brought to center stage. The result is a significant reconsideration not just of Pound's achievement, but of modernist poetics and its relations with history.
The contributors, all major scholars, examine The Cantos from their beginnings in the late 1910s to their inconclusive ending with Pound's death in 1972. Together the essays reconstruct the many contexts in which Pound lived and wrote, and how these affected the evolution of his most important work. Several essays offer comprehensive surveys of the text's publication history, while most examine the development of particular groups of cantos that were produced in succeeding decades.
Repeatedly the essays show that Pound's poem was an unstable work in process, one that readily accommodated input from a variety of agents other than Pound himself, and one that may ultimately have escaped his control altogether.
This book will appeal to readers interested in modern poetry and twentieth-century history. All the essays are written in a style that is clear and free of jargon.
Lawrence S. Rainey is Associate Professor of English, Yale University.
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