Showing papers on "Criticism published in 1987"

Decolonising the mind : the politics of language in African literature

Abstract: Ngugi describes this book as 'a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism and in teaching of literature. North America: Heinemann; Kenya: EAEP

Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse

Abstract: Writing of the disparate projects that seek to establish alternative protocols in disciplinary studies, Edward Said finds their common feature to be that all work out of a secular, marginal and oppositional consciousness, posits 'nothing less than new objects of knowledge ... new theoretical models that upset or at the very least radically alter the prevailing paradigmatic norms', and are 'political and practical in as much as they intend ... the end of dominating, coercive systems of knowledge'. 1 The policy of letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend, which is condensed in this ecumenical scan of contemporary dissident criticism, can act as a caution against the tendency to disown work done within radical traditions other than the most recently enunciated heterodoxies, as necessarily less subversive of the established order. Said's own critique of Orientalism, directed at 'dismantling the science of imperialism', has fed into and augmented colonial discourse analysis, itself engendered where literary theory converged with the transgressive writings of women, blacks and anti-imperialists in the metropolitan wor ld, and post-colonial interrogations of western canons. The construction of a text disrupting imperialism's authorized version was begun long ago within the political and intellectual cultures of colonial liberation movements, and the counter-discourse developed in this milieu which is known to western academies, read by black activists in the USA and transcribed as armed struggle in the other hemisphere, was written way back in the 1950s by Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and polemicist, theoretician and guerilla. Although critics now developing a critique of colonialism do invoke Fanon, this can be a ceremonial gesture to an exemplary and exceptional radical stance

Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and Political Motivations of Lucan Theology.

Abstract: Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1. The socio-redaction criticism of Luke-Acts 2. The community 3. Sectarian strategies 4. Table-fellowship 5. The law 6. The Temple 7. The poor and the rich 8. Rome and the ancestral theme Epilogue: community and Gospel Notes Index of biblical references Index of secondary authors.

Computer criticism vs. technocentric thinking

Abstract: 1: one who expresses a reasoned opinion on any matter involving a judgment of its truth value or righteousness, an appreciation of its beauty or techniques, or an interpretation... 2: one given to harsh or captious judgment.-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary ...the critic may on occasion be called upon to condemn the second rate and expose the fraudulent: though that duty is secondary to the duty of discriminating praise of what is praiseworthy. In the beginning, criticism is simple. Do I like it? My judgment is personal and intuitive. I answer to myself alone, and consider only the immediate object of my attention. Soon, however, something more is needed; taste must be justified. Others challenge our opinions and counter with their own, and even personal development eventually requires us to grapple with our reasons. The LOGO community faces the challenge of finding a voice for public dialogue. Where do we look? There is no shortage of models. The education establishment offers the notion of evaluation. Educational psychologists offer the notion of controlled experiment. The computer magazines have developed the idiom of product review. Philosophical tradition suggests inquiry into the essential nature of computation. Each of these has intellectual value in its proper place. I shall argue that this proper place is a conservative context where change is small, slow, and superficial. The crucial experiment, to take one example, is based on a concept of changing a single factor in a complex situation while keeping everything else the same. I shall argue that this is radically incompatible with the enterprise of rebuilding an education system in which nothing shall be the same. I would like to propose a very different model for thinking about the dialogue between LOGO and the world. This model is a department of thought that adopts the adjective \"critical\" in Webster's first sense. I am proposing a genre of writing one could call \"computer criticism\" by

Ideology and U.S. foreign policy

Abstract: This new edition of Michael H. Hunt's classic reinterpretation of American diplomatic history includes a preface that reflects on the personal experience and intellectual agenda behind the writing of the book, surveys the broad impact of the book's argument, and addresses the challenges to the thesis since the book's original publication. In the wake of 9/11 this interpretation is more pertinent than ever. Praise for the previous edition: "Clearly written and historically sound. . . . A subtle critique and analysis."-Gaddis Smith, Foreign Affairs "A lean, plain-spoken treatment of a grand subject. . . . A bold piece of criticism and advocacy. . . . The right focus of the argument may insure its survival as one of the basic postwar critiques of U.S. policy."-John W. Dower, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists "A work of intellectual vigor and daring, impressive in its scholarship and imaginative in its use of material."-Ronald Steel, Reviews in American History "A masterpiece of historical compression."-Wilson Quarterly "A penetrating and provocative study. . . . A pleasure both to read and to contemplate."-John Martz, Journal of Politics

Information Technology and Education: Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking

Abstract: Seymour Papert is Professor of Media Technology and Head of the Learning and Epistemology Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139. His specializations are mathematics and education. thing more is needed; taste must be justified. Others challenge our opinions and counter with their own, and even personal development eventually requires us to grapple with our reasons. The Logo community faces the challenge of finding a voice for public dialogue. Where do we look? There is no shortage of models. The education establishment offers the notion of evaluation. Educational psychologists offer the notion of controlled experiment. The computer magazines have developed the idiom of product review. Philosophical tradition suggests inquiry into the essential nature of computation. Each of these has intellectual value in its proper place. I shall argue that this proper place is a conservative context where change is small, slow and superficial. The crucial experiment, to take one example, is based on a concept of changing a single factor in a complex situation while keeping everything else the same. I shall argue that this is radically incompatible with the enterprise of rebuilding an education system in which nothing shall be the same. Today, I am sharing with you the result of looking at a very different model for thinking about the dialogue between Logo and the world. This model is a department of thought that adopts the adjective critical in Webster's first sense. I am proposing a genre of writing one could call ' 'computer criticism" by analogy with such disciplines as literary criticism and social criticism. The name does not imply that such writing would condemn computers any more than literary criticism condemns literature or social criticism condemns society. The purpose of computer criticism is not to condemn but to understand, to explicate, to place in perspective. Of course, understanding does not exclude harsh (perhaps even captious) judgment. The result of understanding may well be to debunk. But critical judgment may also open our eyes to previously unnoticed virtue. And in the end, the critical and the creative processes need each other.

Death is the mother of beauty: Mind, metaphor, criticism.

Abstract: In this book, Mark Turner shows that the languages of literature and everyday life are different expressions of the same universal mechanisms of the mind. Drawing on the languages and metaphors of kinship and causation, and on myriad examples in English literature from Chaucer to Wallace Stevens, he argues convincingly that all our thinking with language depends on a restricted range of deep metaphors and inference patterns.

Computation into criticism : a study of Jane Austen's novels and an experiment in method

Abstract: It is a truth quite infrequently acknowledged that, in most discussions of works of English fiction, we proceed as if a third of our material was not really there Common prepositions, conjunctions, personal pronouns, and articles, and the verb-forms "was", "be", and "had", make up such a proportion of each of Jane Austen's novels There is no doubt that a roughly similar proportion exists in the work of many other English novelists John Burrows shows that in the drawing of character in Jane Austen's writings very common words prove to be intrinsically revealing

An Attainable Version of High Literacy: Approaches to Teaching Higher-Order Skills in Reading and Writing

Abstract: One way of criticizing contemporary literacy education is to credit it with trying to do the right things, but to argue that the means could stand improvement. With great variation in the amount and kind of improvement recommended, this seems to be the line of criticism taken by almost everyone from alarmist critics (e.g., Cooperman 1978; Flesch 1981) to blue-ribbon panelists (e.g., Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson 1985; National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983). A quite different line of criticism, however, attacks the aim of contemporary literacy education, charging it with being oriented toward the development of a low form of literacy. In their historical analysis of literacy instruction. Resnick and Resnick (1977) identify high literacy and low literacy as distinct educational traditions. High literacy has been a tradition in education of the elites in Europe and America. It has been aimed at developing the linguistic and verbal reasoning abilities, the literary standards an...

The return of the reader : reader-response criticism

Abstract: An introduction to work on reader-response criticism which reflects on the spectrum of alternative projects which reader-oriented criticism generates.

Gender and Reading Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts

Abstract: "An unprecedented encounter between feminist criticism, reading-research and reader-response criticism...I found 'Gender and Reading' a valuable book to read as a feminist critic. Valuable because it asserts our rights, as women, to read; to read as women. Valuable because it begins a dialogue among so many varieties of criticism and theory."--Susan Squier, 'Women's Review of Books.'

Economics in Perspective: A Critical History

Abstract: Foreword ixRichard ParkerTo Acknowledge xix1 A Look at the Landscape 12 After Adam 103 The Enduring Interim 234 The Merchants and the State 355 The French Design 516 The New World of Adam Smith 637 Refinement, Affirmation-and the Seeds of Revolt 808 The Great Classical Tradition, 1: Around the Margins 989 The Great Classical Tradition, 2: The Mainstream 11310 The Great Classical Tradition, 3: The Defense of the Faith 12411 The Grand Assault 13912 The Separate Personality of Money 15413 American Concerns: Trade and Trusts Enriched and the Rich 17014 Completion and Criticism 19515 The Primal Force of the Great Depression 21116 The Birth of the Welfare State 22917 John Maynard Keynes 24118 Affirmation by Mars 25919 High Noon 27420 Twilight and Evening Bell 29021 The Present as the Future, 1 30722 The Present as the Future, 2 318Index 327

The ascetic imperative in culture and criticism

Abstract: In this bold interdisciplinary work, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that asceticism has played a major role in shaping Western ideas of the body, writing, ethics, and aesthetics. He suggests that we consider the ascetic as "the 'cultural' element in culture," and presents a close analysis of works by Athanasius, Augustine, Matthias, Grunewald, Nietzsche, Foucault, and other thinkers as proof of the extent of asceticism's resources. Harpham demonstrates the usefulness of his findings by deriving from asceticism a "discourse of resistance," a code of interpretation ultimately more generous and humane than those currently available to us."

Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance

Abstract: An introduction to women writers of the English Renaissance which takes up 44 works, many as thumbnail sketches; shows how women's writing was hampered by the assumption that poets were male, by restriction to pious subject matter, by the doctrine that only silent women are virtuous, by criticism that praised women as patrons or muses and ignored their writing, and above all by crippling educational theories.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Writing Critical Ethnographic Narratives

Abstract: This article assumes that educational anthropologists are interested in critical theory, or what Marcus and Fischer have recently called “a renewal of the critical function of anthropology as it is pursued in ethnographic projects at home” (1986:112), because critical theory argues that social institutions, such as schools, are sites of cultural hegemony. In other words, I am presuming that educational anthropologists, like many other academics, are interested in grounding their research in a theory of social construction because they wish not only to describe and analyze social practices, but to interrupt those social practices they believe oppress certain designated classes inside educational institutions, namely students, teachers, minorities, and women. Hence, whether one's interest in cultural criticism derives from the work of the founding members of the Frankfurt School or from that of educational revisionists, such as Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1973), Bowles and Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), Bourdieu and Passeron's Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1977), Apple and Weiss's Ideology and Practice in Schooling (1983), and Giroux's Theory and Resistance in Education (1983), to name only a few, the goal of critical ethnography is always the same: to help create the possibility of transforming such institutions as schools—through a process of negative critique. NEGATIVE CRITIQUE, ETHNOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE, CULTURAL HEGEMONY, WRITING

Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I

Abstract: List of illustrations Preface and acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1. Culture and politics, court and country: assumptions and problems, questions and suggestions 2. Sir William Davenant and the drama of love and passion 3. Thomas Carew and the poetry of love and nature 4. Aurelian Townshend and the poetry of natural innocence 5. The Caroline court masque 6. Criticism and compliment: the politics of love Index.

The Feminist Critique of Art History

Abstract: Art criticism and art history from a feminist perspective are recent phenomena, emerging only during the last fifteen years. They have, in their short history, moved from a first generation in which “the condition and experience of being female” was emphasized, to a second generation, beginning in the late 1970s, influenced by feminist criticism in other disciplines and offering a more complex critique of both art and culture through an investigation of the production and evaluation of art and the role of the artist. In this survey, we propose, first, to outline the history of feminist art and art history, then to discuss the interrelated themes in each, and, finally, in the concluding and pivotal sections (IV and V), to discuss various feminist art-critical and art-historical methodologies.

The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama

Abstract: A SPECTER IS haunting criticism-the specter of a new historicism. As Jean Howard tells us in a recent Shakespeare Quarterly, "Suddenly indifference to history has been replaced by avid interest. Renaissance journals are full of essays placing the works of Milton, Donne, and Spenser in historical context." And not just Renaissance journals: the trend evident there is "part of a much larger critical movement in the post-structuralist period to rehistoricize literary studies" (236). This movement stems from the perception that poststructuralist criticism in its earlier textualist or deconstructive phase was essentially a continuation of formalism. However interesting at the peripheries, it retained the central impulse of formalism to focus on the text in isolation from human will and desire and from the particular social formation within which will and desire are produced, directed, controlled, satisfied, frustrated. The new historical criticism aims at putting the text back into the context from which it was generated. This emphasis on the cultural production of texts extends to their reception as well. Audiences themselves have will and desire, which also develop in connection with social or cultural authority. Hence the new historicization of literary studies is equally a new politicization, with interpretation judged as an expression of the political interests of the audience-sometimes the contemporary audience, sometimes the modern one, sometimes both. And here again the phenomenon is by no means unique to Renaissance studies. David Simpson points out that in 1983 at least five books focused on "the politics of Romanticism" (81). Moreover, the major theoretical journals have taken a similar course, publishing special issues with titles like The Politics of Interpretation and Nuclear Criticism.' One final example: when Wayne Booth tells us recently in the pages of Critical Inquiry that he is trading in his reliable and efficient "implied reader" for a powerful new vehicle called the "real reader," we may be sure we have turned a corner. But do we know where we are going? And are we sure we want to get there? Putting the text back into history sounds like something we might all want to do, but we should be certain we know what history means and what the practical consequences of such a program are. It also sounds like a good idea to acknowledge the political needs of real audiences, instead of mystifying those needs with some formalist, neo-Kantian Myth of an Audience-as long as we can be persuaded that the real audience is not itself just another myth, another hypothetical construct, and that the politics of literature are not, rather, as Gerald Graff suggests, pseudopolitics. In considering these matters, I focus first on recent commentaries about Renaissance drama, but only as examples; I quickly juxtapose the Renaissance critics with other sorts of writers-such as Althusser, Foucault, and Jameson-who can define new-historicist assumptions in the most general way and who can provide the clearest framework for the questions I want to ask: How do new-historicist critics characterize the text? What do they mean by history? How do they typically understand the relation between the two? Claiming to describe a general or typical new historicism is presumptuous; simply to write about the new historicism is to construct a fiction, a critical fabrication, like the Elizabethan World Picture or the Medieval Mind. Many different and even contradictory critical practices are currently represented as new historicism. Nonetheless, as I understand the project, it is at its core-or, better, at its cutting edge-a kind of "Marxist criticism." The label does not eliminate the problem of typicality or generality; it merely relocates it. By centering the new historicism in Marxist criticism, do I mean classical Marxism or some of the different, "softer" revisions prefaced by neo or post? The answer is that I mean all of them, to the extent that they all view history and contemporary political life as determined, wholly or in essence, by struggle, contestation, power relations, libido dominandi. This assumption, which I find the most problematic aspect of the new historicism, brings me to the last and by far the most important question I want to

The Theory of Human Nature

Abstract: This chapter focuses on three simple postulata: all socioeconomic theories contain, explicitly or implicitly, a theory of human nature, institutionalism is a socioeconomic theory and institutionalism must, therefore, include a theory of human nature. The majority of those post-Clarence Ayres neoinstitutionalist writers who added to, or employed, the Ayresian theory of human nature may be divided into two broad groups: the “Texas School” and the “Colorado School” of neoinstitutionalists. The appellation “Colorado School” is used as an umbrella term for both traditions. The neoinstitutionalists are united in their criticism and rejection of the orthodox concept of human nature; a concept that is epitomized in the phrase “the economic man.” Ayres’s theory of human nature constitutes the basis for those neoinstitutionalist works on human behavior that have been produced by some of his colleagues at The University of Texas at Austin and by a number of his former students elsewhere.

One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature

Abstract: In this volume, the first in the series Science and Literature, editor George Levin has brought together the contributions of historians, critics, and philosophers of science to explore these relationships. From the preface: "The interaction between science and literature has been a subject of growing concern in criticism; the languages of science have increasingly found their way into literature and into discussions of it. And the traditional assumptions that literary people care nothing about science, scientists care nothing about literature have been belied throughout the twentieth century but particularly in recent years. There remain, however, large gaps of knowledge and of misunderstanding that make fruitful interchange and informed discussion difficult to achieve. And while this series will be aimed primarily at a literary audience, we are hoping to be of use as well to historians and philosophers of science at a level high enough to ensure the respect if not the agreement of the scientific community. While the series will not take a 'position' in relation to controverted questions and will leave the directions of the arguments to the highly qualified and independent scholars and critics it seeks, it does grow from three assumptions, first, that science and literature are two alternative but related expressions of a culture's values, assumptions, and intellectual frameworks; second, that understanding science in its relation to culture and literature requires some understanding not only of its own internal processes, but of the pressures upon it exercised by social, political aesthetic, psychological, and biographical forces; third, that the idea of 'influence' of one upon the other must work both ways it is not only science that influences literature, but literature that influences science. These assumptions, of course, are not uncontroversial, and they impinge on such large issues as the question of 'representation' in literature and entail corollaries about such matters as the 'rationality' of science, or the degree to which it actually describes reality that are at the center of contemporary battles within the philosophy of science. We hope that this series will throw light on these matters. The subject is enormous, its importance inescapable. Vague as the enterprise may occasionally seem when viewed in the abstract, its significances are clear when we get down to cases, as the authors of the several essays in this volume do. The range of questions they address intimates the ambitions of the series.""

The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

Abstract: Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an embarrassment. One resists labeling as a "psychoanalytic critic" because the kind of criticism evoked by the term mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself. Thus I have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of structuralist and semiotic narratology. And in general, I think we need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least since 1908, when Freud published his essay on "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," and if the enterprise has recently been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched bedfellows-or perhaps I should say playmates. The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic ciriticism tends to fall into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis: the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text. The first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance of the author