Literary criticism

About: Literary criticism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 21402 publications have been published within this topic receiving 321071 citations. The topic is also known as: literary reviewing & book reviewing.

Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts

Abstract: This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Abstract: In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike

Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities

Abstract: PART ONE: Literature in the Reader 1. Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics 2. What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It? 3. How Ordinary Is Ordinary Language? 4. What It's Like To Read L'Allegro and II Penseroso 5. Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader 6. Interpreting the Variorum 7. Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum" 8. Structuralist Homiletics 9. How To Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech- Act Theory and Literary Criticism 10. What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It? Part II 11. Normal Circumstances and Other Special Cases 12. A Reply to John Reichert PART TWO: Interpretive Authority in the Classroom and in Literary Criticism 13. Is There a Text in This Class? 14. How To Recognize a Poem When You See One 15. What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable? 16. Demonstration vs. Persuasion: Two Models of Critical Activity Notes Index

On the Postcolony

Abstract: Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of post colonial studies writing today. In "On the Postcolony" he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of post colonial theory. This thought-provoking and groundbreaking collection of essays - his first book to be published in English - develops and extends debates first ignited by his well-known 1992 article 'Provisional Notes on the Postcolony', in which he developed his notion of the 'banality of power' in contemporary Africa. Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia, and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity - violence, wonder, and laughter - to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century. This provocative book will surely attract attention with its signal contribution to the rich interdisciplinary arena of scholarship on colonial and post colonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

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.