Showing papers on "Criticism published in 1983"

The world, the text, and the critic

Abstract: In these essays, Edward Said challenges contemporary literary criticism. He examines, among other things, narrative, focusing on Joseph Conrad and the curious dearth of literature on Jonathan Swift.

On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism

Abstract: Preface to New Edition. Preface to First Edition Introduction Chapter 1: Readers and Reading 1. New Fortunes 2. Reading as a Woman 3. Stories of Reading Chapter 2: Deconstruction 1. Writing and Logocentrism 2. Meaning and Iterability 3. Grafts and Graft 4. Institutions and Inversions 5. Critical Consequences Chapter 3: Deconstructive Criticism Bibliography. Index

Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism

Abstract: No wonder you activities are, reading will be always needed. It is not only to fulfil the duties that you need to finish in deadline time. Reading will encourage your mind and thoughts. Of course, reading will greatly develop your experiences about everything. Reading tropics of discourse essays in cultural criticism is also a way as one of the collective books that gives many advantages. The advantages are not only for you, but for the other peoples with those meaningful benefits.

Collective Strategy: Social Ecolog of Organizational Environments

Abstract: Population ecologists, emphasizing the powerful constraining influence of environment on organizational autonomy, challenge the validity of the notion of strategic choice, which is so central to the field of business policy. This criticism may apply legitimately at the level of single organizations, but it does not reduce the importance of strategic choice at the collective level of analysis. A framework for analyzing strategic actions undertaken jointly by members of interorganizational collectivities is offered, based on a social ecological approach.

"Race," writing, and difference

Abstract: A classic of cultural criticism, "Race," Writing, and Difference provides a broad introduction to the idea of "race" as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory. This collection demonstrates the variety of critical approaches through which one may discuss the complexities of racial "otherness" in various modes of discourse. Now, fifteen years after their first publication, these essays have managed to escape the cliches associated with the race-class-gender trinity of '80s criticism, and remain a provocative overview of the complex interplay between race, writing, and difference.

The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation

Abstract: Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works have for too long been dominated by a Romantic ideology by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations Jerome J. McGann presents a new, "critical" view of the subject that calls for a radically revisionary reading of Romanticism. In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Words worth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth, but the entire movement is subjected to a searching critique. Arguing that poetry is produced and reproduced within concrete historical contexts and that criticism must take these contexts into account, McGann shows how the ideologies embodied in Romantic poetry and theory have shaped and distorted contemporary critical activities."

The social mission of English criticism, 1848-1932

Abstract: This book examines the transformation of English literary criticism which underlies the study of English literature today, focusing on the social objectives of the pioneer critics and educationalists who established modern English studies. In particular, he discusses their view of literary culture as a civilizing influence capable of reconciling class conflict, and their concern for its preservation in the face of the new dangers of "mass society": advertising, pulp fiction, and cinema.

The ideological turn in modern criticism

Abstract: This essay offers an approach to the ideological underpinnings of 20th‐century criticism, especially but not only American speech criticism. In juxtaposing social events with critical and metacritical statements offered by Herbert Wichelns, Kenneth Burke, Forbes Hill, Lawrence Rosenfield, and Martin Heidegger, the study isolates the ideological force of varied approaches to criticism.

Criticism and social change

Abstract: ""Criticism and Social Change" speaks with special timeliness to the role of the political intellectual (here embodied in Kenneth Burke). Lentricchia's provocative analysis demands serious reflection by American radicals." Frederic Jameson "A profound meditation on relations obtaining among writing, political consciousness, and criticism this last taken in its most general sense. It is written with passion and grace; it is shot through with learning, intimate knowledge of the critical tradition, and a deep (though by no means uncritical) understanding of the work (as well as social significance) of Kenneth Burke." Hayden White"

Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare

Abstract: IntroductionHamlet Have you a daughter?Polonius I have my lord.Hamlet Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a blessing. But as your daughter may conceive -- friend look to 't.Polonius How say you by that? (Aside) Still harping on my daughter.It was almost inevitable that feminist criticism, even before it had begun to clarify its ideas of peculiarly feminist approaches to the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would try its teeth on that most patriarchal body of texts, the works of William Shakespeare. It was as predictable, I suppose, that the collection of studies which emerged would be fragmentary, confusing and contradictory. What was less expected was that feminist studies of Shakespeare would be so predictable as criticism -- that they would be marked, almost without exception, by an all too familiar sameness in their reverence for the realism of Shakespeare's plays. The present work was written on a growing tide of personal irritation at the apparent inability of such critics to break with the conventions of orthodox Shakespeare criticism, except in their single-minded preoccupation with the female characters in the plays, and their hostility to the chauvinistic attitudes the plays incorporate. Just concentrating on the female characters, or protesting as political feminists at the sexist views expressed by the male characters, will not get us very far with a feminist Shakespeare criticism appropriate to the 1980s.There appear currently to be two main lines of approach to Shakespeare's drama within a feminist perspective (in some cases it would be more appropriate to dub them 'lines of attack'). The first assumes that Shakespeare has earned his position at the heart of the traditional canon of English literature by creating characters who reflect every possible nuance of that richness and variety which is to be found in the world around us. His female characters, according to this view, reflect accurately the whole range of specifically female qualities (which qualities are supposed to be fixed and immutable from Shakespeare's own day down to our own). In the words of a prominent female Shakespearean actor: From the point of view of an actress, the Shakespearean women are most satisfactory people, for when portrayed they actually seem to feed the artist even when she is giving out the most of herself in the performance of her part. They are so true; their nobility, beauty, tenderness, loveliness, lightheartedness, subtlety, provocativeness, passion, vengefulness, worthlessness, stupidity and a hundred more qualities so entirely right from the feminine point of view that they provide a field the most ambitious artist could scarcely hope to cover.'Shakespeare's vision of women transcended the limits of his time and sex', even if his inspired vision was dimmed by those who subsequently directed his works on the stage. This means, we are told, that Shakespeare's women characters 'offer insights into women's perceptions of themselves in a patriarchal world'.

Beyond Criticism: The Authority of the School Text

Abstract: Research and literature on the nature and function of the school text, predominantly the concern of curriculum developers and educational psychologists, has been narrowly focused on the efficient delivery of reading skills and disciplinary knowledge. During the 1970s, David R. Olson began to formulate an interdisciplinary research orientation on the educational nature and function of textual knowledge (Bruner and Olson, 1977; Olson, 1977a). In On the Language and Authority of Textbooks (1980), Olson develops his general discussion of the cognitive and cultural "bias" of print to explain the force and meaning of a specific genre of text, the school textbook. Our purpose in this article is to critically explore Olson's view of the school text, focusing on the distinctive communicational constraints of both the school text and the classroom context. To this end we will examine the textbook's mode of discourse, the techniques of text construction, its material quality, and the institutional practices which circumscribe it. We take note of Michel Foucault's explanation (1972), which we share, that "the statement," textual or spoken, embodies an authority and meaning only insofar as it exists in a "discursive field"a field of use and exchange.

St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus

Abstract: The Life of St Martin by Sulpicius Severus was one of the formative works of Latin hagiography. Yet although written by a contemporary who knew Martin, it attracted immediate criticism. Why? This study seeks an explanation by placing Sulpicius works both in their intellectual context, and in the context of a church that was then undergoing radical transformation. It is thus both a study of Sulpicius, Martin, and their world, and at the same time an essay in the interpretation of hagiography.

The Self-Presentation of a Discipline: History of Psychology in the United States between Pedagogy and Scholarship

Abstract: Criticism of scholarship in the history of psychology from historians and philosophers of science is certainly not new. In 1966, for example, Robert M. Young characterized the field as “an avocation with very uneven standards”, limited primarily to biographies of great psychologists, extended reviews of the literature and the uncritical chronicling of the rise of scientific psychology, based on a narrowly preconceived model of scientific development (1). Recent criticism has renewed all of these charges, particularly the last. Walter Weimer, a psychologist interested in the philosophy of science, accuses the writers of historical textbooks of ‘crypto-justificationism’, of describing the ‘evolution’ of their discipline as a continuously progressive path to the present. Weimer sees a close connection here between the history of psychology as traditionally written and the operationalist version of logical empiricism, the dominant philosophy of science in American psychology since the 1940s. In his view, both theorists and historians of psychology have continued to subscribe to a view of science which is “unbelievably out of date”, if not “the blackest of metatheoretical lies” (2).

What's wrong with immediate knowledge?

Abstract: Immediate knowledge is here construed as true belief that does not owe its status as knowledge to support by other knowledge (or justified belief) of the same subject. The bulk of the paper is devoted to a criticism of attempts to show the impossibility of immediate knowledge. I concentrate on attempts by Wilfrid Sellars and Laurence Bonjour to show that putative immediate knowledge really depends on higher-level knowledge or justified belief about the status of the beliefs involved in the putative immediate knowledge. It is concluded that their arguments are lacking in cogency.

New Testament Exegesis: A Handbook for Students and Pastors

Abstract: Building on the belief that the task of exegesis is to understand the divine-human intention locked within the biblical text, Gordon Fee provides a lucid step-by-step analysis of exegetical procedures that has made New Testament Exegesis a standard textbook for nearly two decades. Now more than ever, with an updated, newly integrated bibliography and an appendix directly addressing reader-response criticism, this essential, classic guide will assist students, scholars, and clergy in coming to grips with the New Testament.

Monetary Variability: United States and Japan: Note

Abstract: Many economists have criticized the Federal Reserve because of the high variability of monetary growth in the United States since the change in operating procedures on October 6, 1979. Chairman Paul Volcker has responded to this criticism in congressional testimony (November 19, 1980) and in a letter to Senator Garn (February 18, 1982) by asserting that "international comparisons. . . all appear to demonstrate the same point: U.S. monetary aggregates rank at or near the top of the league in terms of low variability," and this is true "even allowing for the technical difficulties involved in making such international comparisons."

At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text

Abstract: The referential and marginal features of footnotes serve different functions in criticism and literature: scholarly footnotes shore up the text by enclosing it and limiting its claims; in fiction, footnotes extend textual authority by enlarging the fictional context. Both inner- and outer-directed, these two kinds of notations display a self-conscious anxiety about the critical and creative acts they annotate. Scholarly notes mask this ambivalence by claiming extratextual authority; literary notes highlight the ambivalence by consciously dividing the text against itself. This essay examines the ways footnotes in Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegans Wake parody the notational convention and draw attention to the faulted authority of its discourse by flouting scholarly claims to objectivity and neutrality, by calling into question the relations of author and reader on textual grounds, and by using self-reflexive narrative methods to illustrate the rhetorical double bind that keeps all language at the margin of discourse.

Cristoforo Landino's Aeneid and the Humanist Critical Tradition

Abstract: There is little question that the Virgil criticism of early Italian humanism reached its zenith in the Disputationes Camaldulenses of Cristoforo Landino. Professor of rhetoric and poetry at the Florentine Studium from 1457 to 1497, Landino was active in the circle of philosophers, poets, and scholars associated with Marsilio Ficino and often referred to now as the "Platonic Academy of Florence. 'I The

Identity: Its Emergence within Sociological Psychology*

Abstract: Identity is an oft used technical term in sociological social psychology. Yet, its rather recent emergence remains uncharted. Discussion of its origin in the post World War II period from the writings of Erikson leads to recognition of its rapid development in the 1960's and 1970's. Five theoretical sources are currently informing the development and use of the concept. Its continued strength is apparently in response to the need to interpret contemporary American society. By the 1980's, identity serves as a powerful bridging concept stretched across micro and macro levels of theory and reaching from laboratory analyses to cultural criticism.

Weber on Bureaucracy: Management Consultant or Political Theorist?

Abstract: Disputing the generally accepted view of Weber's essays on bureaucracy, this paper argues that these writings were not concerned with problems of organizational efficiency or effectiveness. The prevalence of such understanding is attributed to mistranslation of Weber's manuscripts. A more suitable interpretation is presented, and its ramifications are discussed.

The concept of musical grammar

Abstract: Music analysis and, in particular music criticism, two fundamental tools of historical research and musicology in the broadest sense have become extremely difficult and problematical disciplines in the last few decades. The actual practice of analysis and criticism has by no means come to a halt, but the amount of 'truth' which was once thought obtainable from them or, at least, which was believed to have been won in the actual moment of undertaking them has diminished. We have begun to question the validity of certain elementary notions current in musicological parlance, for instance those connected with the concept of phraseology;' the harmonic concepts which have been the pillars of our musical thinking are now being discussed and reexamined from different points of view,2 and even the very idea of 'talking about music' must be revised with regard to its epistemological foundations.3 From all this it is clear that no scholar today can write about music with the same confidence and equanimity as his predecessors. His responsibilities are greater, and the fields he has chosen to research require kinds of knowledge that had previously been thought neither necessary nor relevant. These difficulties arise from at least two factors. First, there is the obvious problem that the analysis (or description) of a musical text always presupposes, sometimes implicitly or even quite unconsciously, some underlying theoretical basis: even in the most elementary analytical discussions for example when numbers of bars are counted, or corresponding phrases are distinguished reference is inevitably made to a set of theoretical ideas4 sometimes even without the writer being directly acquainted with it. What is more, the latent ideas which support an analytical or descriptive statement are