Journal ArticleDOI
What Is New Formalism
TLDR
A review of new formalism poses challenges very different from those of the familiar compendium-review genre (e.g., “The Year's Work in Victorian Studies”) as discussed by the authors.Abstract:
This review of new formalism poses challenges very different from those of the familiar compendium-review genre (e.g., “The Year's Work in Victorian Studies”). While all review essays face questions of inclusion, in an assignment of this kind, where the defining category is neither an established period nor topic but a developing theory or method emerging from the entire repertoire of literary and cultural studies, identifying the scholarly literature is a critical task in its own right. Moreover, because new formalism is better described as a movement than a theory or method, the work of selection is especially vexed and consequential. It is vexed because the practitioners' modes and degrees of identification with the movement are so various, and consequential because the reviewer's bibliographic decisions cannot help but construct the phenomenon being described.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Surface Reading: An Introduction
Stephen Best,Sharon Marcus +1 more
TL;DR: In the text-based disciplines, psychoanalysis and Marxism have had a major influence on how we read, and this has been expressed most consistently in the practice of symptomatic reading, a mode of interpretation that assumes that a text's truest meaning lies in what it does not say, describes textual surfaces as superfluous, and seeks to unmask hidden meanings.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us
TL;DR: The authors use quantitative methods to analyze a collection of 21,367 scholarly articles in literary studies from 1889 to 2013. But they do not claim to provide a definitive or objective perspective on disciplinary history; instead, their approach, like the related methods of content analysis in the social sciences, allows them to pursue nuanced interpretations of the language of many texts at once.
Journal ArticleDOI
On Failing to Make the Past Present
TL;DR: The slave past has assumed a primacy in black critical thought that it did not necessarily have previously, entailing a particu- tional role in black political goals as mentioned in this paper.
Book ChapterDOI
Preposterous Poetics and the Erotics of Death
TL;DR: In this article, a paradigmatic moment of military conflict from the central and hugely long narrative of war between Dionysus and the Indians, with which I will be concerned in this article, Deriades, the Indian chief, as he summons his troops for the battle, boasts (Dion. 27.41-2).
References
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Book
A theory of literary production
TL;DR: In this paper, some elementary concepts such as self-criticism and judgement are discussed, along with a discussion of the role of the author in the development of the novel.
Book
Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign
TL;DR: Krieger as discussed by the authors argues that the "ekphrastic principle" has remained enduringly problematic in that it reflects the resistant paradoxes of representation in words, and that more recent theories radically question the political and aesthetic assumptions of the modernists and the 2,000-year tradition they claim to culminate.
Book
Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion
TL;DR: Ellison as mentioned in this paper traces the evolution of the politics of emotion on both sides of the Atlantic from the late-17th to the early-19th century, and explores the enduring link between male stoicism and male sensibility in political and cultural life.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism
TL;DR: The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism Author(s): Alan Liu Source: ELH, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 721-771 as discussed by the authors.