Showing papers on "Literary science published in 2010"

Why Do We Care about Literary Characters

Abstract: Blakey Vermeule wonders how readers become involved in the lives of fictional characters, people they know do not exist. Vermeule examines the ways in which readers' experiences of literature are affected by the emotional attachments they form to fictional characters and how those experiences then influence their social relationships in real life. She focuses on a range of topics, from intimate articulations of sexual desire, gender identity, ambition, and rivalry to larger issues brought on by rapid historical and economic change. Vermeule discusses the phenomenon of emotional attachment to literary characters primarily in terms of 18th-century British fiction but also considers the postmodern work of Thomas Mann, J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, and Chinua Achebe. From the perspective of cognitive science, Vermeule finds that caring about literary characters is not all that different from caring about other people, especially strangers. The tools used by literary authors to sharpen and focus reader interest tap into evolved neural mechanisms that trigger a caring response. This book contributes to the emerging field of evolutionary literary criticism. Vermeule draws upon recent research in cognitive science to understand the mental processes underlying human social interactions without sacrificing solid literary criticism. People interested in literary theory, in cognitive analyses of the arts, and in Darwinian approaches to human culture will find much to ponder in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?

Bakhtin's Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives

Abstract: This edited volume is the first scholarly tome exclusively dedicated to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope. This concept, initially developed in the 1930s and used as a frame of reference throughout Bakhtin’s own writings, has been highly influential in literary studies. After an extensive introduction that serves as a ‘state of the art’, the volume is divided into four main parts: Philosophical Reflections, Relevance of the Chronotope for Literary History, Chronotopical Readings and Some Perspectives for Literary Theory. These thematic categories contain contributions by well-established Bakhtin specialists such as Gary Saul Morson and Michael Holquist, as well as a number of essays by scholars who have published on this subject before. Together the papers in this volume explore the implications of Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope for a variety of theoretical topics such as literary imagination, polysystem theory and literary adaptation; for modern views on literary history ranging from the hellenistic romance to nineteenth-century realism; and for analyses of well-known novelists and poets as diverse as Milton, Fielding, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Papadiamandis and DeLillo.

Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture

Abstract: Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah's Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindle digital reader, literary fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Collins highlights the infrastructural and cultural changes that have given rise to a flourishing reading public at a time when the future of the book has been called into question. Book reading, he claims, has not become obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visual media. Collins explores how digital technologies and the convergence of literary, visual, and consumer cultures have changed what counts as a "literary experience" in phenomena ranging from lush film adaptations such as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to the customer communities at Amazon. Central to Collins's analysis and, he argues, to contemporary literary culture, is the notion that refined taste is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. Using recent novels, he shows that the redefined literary landscape has affected not just how books are being read, but also what sort of novels are being written for these passionate readers. Collins connects literary bestsellers from The Jane Austen Book Club and Literacy and Longing in L.A. to Saturday and The Line of Beauty, highlighting their depictions of fictional worlds filled with avid readers and their equations of reading with cultivated consumer taste.

Literary geography: reforging the connections:

Abstract: This article explores the current landscape of literary geography against the backdrop of a broadened interest in geography’s textual traditions. It suggests that after a period of relative health in the mid- to late twentieth century literary geography has been seemingly lost within wider debates over textual knowledges and practices as they pattern out within the discipline’s scientific history. Drawing on work from literary studies and geography, it goes on to propose three areas where there is opportunity for a literary geography to reassert itself and contribute forcefully to geographical debates.

Our aesthetic categories

Abstract: The recent turn to aesthetics in literary studies has been embraced by some of its advocates as a polemical riposte to critique: a practice increasingly attacked from multiple directions but here specifically for doing artworks the disservice of reducing them to encryptions of history or ideology. But while the new or revived focus on pleasure (and, to a much lesser extent, displeasure)1 has been vaunted for the way in which it seems to circumvent the reduction of artworks to historical or ideological concepts, our aesthetic experience is always mediated by a finite if constantly rotating repertoire of aesthetic categories. Any literary or cultural criticism purportedly engaged with aesthetics needs to pay attention to these categories, which are by definition conceptual as well as affective and tied to historically specific forms of communication and collective life. But how does one read an aesthetic category? What kind of object is it, and what methodological difficulties and satisfactions does its analysis pose?

Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After "the Sociology of Literature"

Abstract: he "sociology of literature" has always named a polyglot and rather incoherent set of enterprises. It is scattered across so many separate domains and subdomains of scholarly research, each with its own distinct agendas of theory and method, that it scarcely even rates the designation of a "field." 1 But for purposes of clarity and simplicity, I will focus here on the fate of sociology in the recent history of literary studies. Is literary studies actively invested at present in the project of sustaining a sociology of literature? As currently configured, and facing the particular disciplinary circumstances that we do, are liter- ary scholars capable of producing a new sociology of literature? Would they be favorably disposed toward one if it came their way? One hesitates to answer such questions in the affirmative. New or old, the sociology of literature seems to possess little traction in literary studies. Nobody appears to regret the passing of an "old" sociology of literature, invoked these days (where it is invoked at all) as a stale and outmoded approach, like reader-response or archetypal criticism, barely worth a chapter in the latest theory anthology. But nor would many literary scholars embrace the prospect—as they perceive it—of a new sociological turn, of a more "sociological" future for literary studies. If the old sociology of literature seems all too old, a superseded relic of an earlier moment in the discipline, a new sociology of literature can seem all too contemporary, in step with ominous trends that are driving humanistic inquiry toward some small, sad corner of the increasingly social-science-dominated academy to endure an "interdisciplinary" af- terlife of collaborative media research. I am speaking here of images and perceptions, of what the phrase "sociology of literature" might conjure up in the disciplinary imaginary of the Eng Lit or Comp Lit professoriate. I am not speaking about any actual program of research, about attempts to connect the core mis- sion of sociology with that of literary studies, articulating in new, more thorough, or more provocative ways the social logic of literary texts and

Pedagogical stylistics, literary awareness and empowerment: a critical perspective:

Abstract: Based on the premise that stylisticians who are involved with teaching should be aware of the pedagogical orientation and reading paradigms which inform their practice, this article questions whether critical pedagogy can dialogue with stylistics as an approach to working with literary texts in the classroom. The theoretical claims are illustrated with examples from two Literary Awareness workshops in an EFL situation. The argument leads to the conclusion that irrespective of the political orientation and a rather romantic view of education, some of the ideas proposed by critical pedagogy can still contribute to the area of pedagogical stylistics in the years to come. The article concludes with a recommendation for more empirical research in the area.

Literary Fiction as a Tool for Teaching Social Theory and Critical Consciousness

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss the possibilities that emerge from using literary fiction as a tool for teaching social theory and critical consciousness. Focusing on data from a social theory course I taught in fall 2007, along with my experiences teaching social theory, I evaluate the utility of utilizing literary fiction in the social theory classroom. Serving as a mechanism to encourage the development of critical consciousness, literary fiction can expand classroom dynamics and establish engaged dialogue between students and teachers. In particular, it has the potential to make social theory interesting and meaningful to students who are often anxious about learning social theory.

A masculinist northern wilderness and the emancipatory potential of literary irony

Abstract: There has been an increasing body of critical research in modern literary geography claiming that forms of social oppression and injustice can become established through the institution of literature. It has also been stated that literature can equally well act as an emancipatory ‘tool’ through which subjugated histories are rewritten. This article is concerned with the colonialist history of Finnish northern literature, Lapland romanticism, the exoticism of nature and the interrelations of these with masculinism and sexist oppression. It discusses how northern nature is romanticized through literary stereotypes based on masculinist values and a multidimensional social process of sexism, and how the regional marginalization of northern Finland has been justified at the same time. The primary focus is on the emancipatory potential of untraditional northern literature, on a northern female author, Rosa Liksom, who through her unconventional literary irony has functioned as an emancipatory ‘project’ against ...

Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America

Abstract: Before the Civil War, American writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe had established authorship as a respectable profession for women. But though they had written some of the most popular and influential novels of the century, they accepted the taboo against female writers, regarding themselves as educators and businesswomen. During and after the Civil War, some women writers began to challenge this view, seeing themselves as artists writing for themselves and for posterity. Writing for Immortality studies the lives and works of four prominent members of the first generation of American women who strived for recognition as serious literary artists: Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Combining literary criticism and cultural history, Anne E. Boyd examines how these authors negotiated the masculine connotation of "artist," imagining a space for themselves in the literary pantheon. Redrawing the boundaries between male and female literary spheres, and between American and British literary traditions, Boyd shows how these writers rejected the didacticism of the previous generation of women writers and instead drew their inspiration from the most prominent "literary" writers of their day: Emerson, James, Barrett Browning, and Eliot. Placing the works and experiences of Alcott, Phelps, Stoddard, and Woolson within contemporary discussions about "genius" and the "American artist," Boyd reaches a sobering conclusion. Although these women were encouraged by the democratic ideals implicit in such concepts, they were equally discouraged by lingering prejudices about their applicability to women.

Modifiable Futures: Science Fiction at the Bench

Abstract: Science fiction remains an alien dimension of the history of science. Historical and literary studies of science have become increasingly attentive to various “literary technologies” in scientific practice, the metaphorical features of scientific discourse, and the impact of popular science writing on the social development of scientific knowledge. But the function of science fiction and even literature as such in the history of scientific and technological innovation has often been obscured, misconstrued, or repudiated owing to conventional notions of authorship, influence, and the organic unity of texts. The better to address those close encounters where scientific practice makes use of speculative fiction, this essay proposes that we instead analyze such exchanges as processes of appropriation, remixing, and modification.

The Oxford handbook of medieval literature in English

Abstract: PROLOGUE LITERARY PRODUCTION LITERARY CONSUMPTION LITERATURE, CLERICAL AND LAY LITERARY REALITIES COMPLEX IDENTITIES LITERARY PLACE, SPACE AND TIME LITERARY JOURNEYS EPILOGUE INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS GENERAL INDEX

Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies

Abstract: In his article \"Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies\" Siegfried J. Schmidt discusses aspects of hermeneutics, the systemic and empirical (contextual) approach to literature and culture, radical constructivism, and his postulates for the field of media culture studies. Schmidt describes his understanding of the transformation of literary studies towards media culture studies in the context of overall developments of society. His argumentation with regard to move from hermeneutics to media culture studies offers the postulate that research ought to be empirical and contextual in order to foster intuition, invention, innovation, and socially relevant scholarship. He concludes that the study of culture, literature, and media would further scholarship open to intuition, invention, innovation as input of and inspiration for creativity. Siegfried J. Schmidt, \"Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies\" page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.1 (2010): Siegfried J. SCHMIDT Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies In this article I describe the long travel some literary scholars in Germany and in other countries have undertaken in order to proceed from traditional hermeneutics to empirical and contextual studies of literature and finally to media culture studies. My first sentence already indicates the complexity of what I am going to describe. First, the development I present has not been followed and subscribed by all or even by a majority of literary scholars and only some have taken this decision. However, in my view they succeeded to transform literary studies in a way and to a degree that has lately been discussed intensely on the international landscape of scholarship. This transformation occurred in the framework and in interaction with political, social, economic, and cultural developments since the end of World War II. In Germany, the so-called Adenauer Era was dominated by the concentration of all energies on the material reconstruction of West Germany, heavily destroyed during the war. The \"German economic miracle,\" assisted by the U.S. Marshall Plan and based on an effective capitalism and the ideology of neoliberalism, the aggressive anti-communist propaganda of the political leaders in West Germany, and the circumstances of the Cold War suppressed most attempts to thematize recent German history, World War II, and, above all, the Holocaust. West Germany became integrated in the Western world dominated by the USA, and it supported first steps towards European integration together with France. At the same time, the younger generation rediscovered the rich diversity of modern literature, art, and music since 1920, which had been deliberately suppressed during the Third Reich. Based on these discoveries some of them developed new tendencies in art which opposed aggressively traditional bourgeois, fascist, and communist arts, e.g. the Vienna School, Concrete Art and Poetry, abstract and experimental art, etc. Constructivism, suprematism, the Bauhaus, Dadaism, or surrealism fascinated the new generation as if these tendencies were contemporary and not historical movements. The political and economic leaders in West Germany clearly and quickly realized the strategic potential of abstract art favored above all by the elites in France and the USA. In their eyes, abstraction equalled exclusion of thematic contents or suppression of semantics. Supporting abstract arts thus allowed them to reach two aims: The supporters (i. e., the capitalists) could on the one hand gather cultural capital by economic investments in international art events like the Documenta in Kassel or the Donaueschinger Musikwochen and they could at the same time suppress — by the help of seemingly cultural arguments — a critical confrontation with the past (i.e., mostly their past). More or less the same tendency can be observed in German post-war literary studies. Scholars such as Richard Alewyn, Wolfgang Kayser, or Benno von Wiese, or philosophers like Martin Heidegger continued their work as if nothing had happened. Despite their sympathy with the nazi Reich and not discussed before the mid-1960s, they became prominent in the Bundesrepublik (Federal Republic of Germany) seemingly without any problems. They favored exclusively text-immanent analysis or hermeneutic approaches which excluded the contexts in which literary texts are produced, distributed, received, and post-processed. Literary texts were treated as if they were ontological self-contained entities whose interpretation could only be achieved by specially gifted scholars, since — as e.g., Kayser proclaimed — interpretation cannot be learned (5). As a consequence, literary scholarship was closely connected with structures of social hierarchies of leadership and followership: the \"great interpreters\" were adored and imitated — thus social patterns from recent German history were continued. However, this was only one part of post-World War II West German culture. The part was the existentialist movement in philosophy and the arts which deeply influenced European societies. The thematization of absurdity, of fear, of being thrown into a senseless life facing nothingness articulated by authors such as Jean Paul Sartre or Albert Camus formed a radical contrast to the positivist minded mainstream in/of the West German society. The observation that technical and economic progress can be separated from socio-cultural progress was articulated by authors such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in their critique of the culture industry based on a rereading of the writings of Karl Marx's Das Kapital. The post-war period came to an end in the 1960s and for the first time since the war the economy fell into a crisis and the value system of the Adenauer Era collapsed. Values such as capitalism, parliamentarism, and democracy were put into question and the ideal of the bourgeois Siegfried J. Schmidt, \"Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies\" page 3 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.1 (2010): family and paternal education faded away. Protests against nuclear energy and the remilitarization of West Germany happened in the streets, outside the parliament, and in the political domain. Protesting students proclaimed a new society on the basis of socialist political ideals. Step by step the West German society changed into a post-industrial society with increasing media systems. The homogeneous bourgeois society changed into a pluralistic society which could no longer be directed by causal intervention and strategic planning. In sum, the 1960s can be characterized as a time of severe generational conflicts: now, the nazi period, war, and the Holocaust became analyzed critically and condemned. Students called for political literature and a clear political engagement of literary studies and movements of sub-cultural, above all popular culture shaped the cultural system of post-war German society. In literary studies new topics such as the social history of literature, trivial literature, comics, worker's and exile literature, and the literature and culture of East Germany were discussed and studies, topics which had been excluded by scholars subscribing to hermeneutics. In addition, new approaches and methods were developed or adopted, such as mathematical text analysis (Max Bense, A. Moles), French and East European structuralism and formalism (e.g., Greimas, Jakobson, Ingarden, Lotman, etc.), linguistic poetics, text linguistics, and semiotics. Insight into the social, political, and cultural embedding of literature fostered approaches such as critical literary studies (the Frankfurt School), materialist/Marxist literary studies, the social history of literature, history of reception, and effects of literary reading. Most of these approaches were no longer based upon hermeneutic philosophy; instead, analytic philosophy and the philosophy of language served as new meta-theoretical tools competing with Marxist and social critical orientations. This development produced a completely new situation in literary scholarship. The more or less homogeneous hermeneutic mainstream was replaced gradually by a number of rivalling approaches all of which claimed to be the most reasonable way to treat literature correctly and efficiently. The new situation resulted in a strict separation between the camps: On the one side traditional hermeneutics as a branch of the humanities was attacked by politically oriented scholars. On the other side approaches characterized by a strict disbelief in masters, authorities, and intuition, and a strict belief in rationality, explicitness and precise terminology as solid bases for teaching and learning literary scholarship in a scientific way appeared. An important lesson younger scholars learned at the time was to proceed from isolated items to embedded combinations. Regarding linguistic and literary topics led to the conclusion that the following aspects had to be considered: Words function when they are embedded in sentences; sentences function when embedded in texts, and texts can only function in verbal and nonverbal contexts in discourses and social situations. In other words, pragmatics was supposed to dominate syntax and semantics, an insight that belonged to the core subjects of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy and the speech act theory from Austin to Grice. In the late-1960s Norbert Groeben (University of Köln) and I started to develop an approach which later resulted in the theoretical and methodological framework called Empirische Literaturwissenschaft (ESL: Empirical Study of Literature; for a complete list of my publications see Lisiak and Tötösy de Zepetnek; for a bibliography of the field see Tötösy de Zepetnek, \"Bibliography,\" see also \"Systemic Appro

Recovering Morality: Pragmatic Sociology and Literary Studies

Abstract: The disciplines of sociology and literary studies have seen a renewed interest in morality and in ethics in recent decades, but there has been little dialogue between the two. Recognizing that literary works, both classical and popular, can serve as moral critiques and that readers, of all types and classes, can and often do serve as moral critics, this paper seeks to apply some insights of pragmatic sociology to the field of literature by exploring the ways in which moral claims are expressed, evaluated, and negotiated by texts and through texts by readers. Drawing on the new French pragmatic sociology, represented by sociologists such as Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, this paper claims that fiction has a twofold role in civil society. Firstly, novels serve as critiques in their ability to formalize and dramatize generalizable logics of evaluation and to elicit debates by pointing to the inadequacies of, and clashes between, such evaluative logics in the lives of their characters. Secondly, the reading public is often moved to form its own critiques of a novel, in praise or in denunciation of its content, its form, or its perceived intent, and in doing so exercises its moral capacity in the public sphere. Copyright © 2010 New Literary History, The University of Virginia. This article first appeared in NEW LITERARY HISTORY Volume 41, Issue 2, Spring 2010, pages 351-369. i Yale University. Direct correspondences to the Department of Sociology, Yale University, 493 College St., New Haven, CT 06511; shai.dromi@yale.edu . ii Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 1 RH: Recovering Morality Recovering Morality: Pragmatic Sociology and Literary Studies Shai Dromi and Eva Illouz Recent decades have witnessed the rediscovery of the moral and ethical dimensions of literary texts. Under the impetus of the growing interest in the works of Emmanuel Levinas and the criticism promoted by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty—who conceive of literature as a site for the formulation of ethical dilemmas 1 —literary scholarship has turned towards ethics. This movement, which first gained prominence in the mid-1980s, was undoubtedly a response to the formalism of structuralism and post-structuralism. Questions of otherness, of singularity, of the relation of ethics and aesthetics, of universalism and responsibility became increasingly pertinent for literary scholars as different as Wayne C. Booth and J. Hillis Miller, leading the discipline towards a new concern with the moral dimensions of texts and of reading. 2 A turn towards morality has also been evident in various branches of contemporary sociology. Departing from the dominant paradigms of rational choice theory on the one hand and critical theory on the other, sociologists have elaborated new and insightful ways of accounting for the moral dimension of social life. Through his interpretation and revitalization of Émile Durkheim, sociologist Jeffrey Alexander has unraveled the fundamental role of social “goods” and “evils” in modern societies, demonstrating the centrality of morality in the eruption and management of public scandals, in practices of inclusion and exclusion, and in the very underpinnings of democratic life. 3 A different perspective on morality is developed by Michèle

Lessons from literature for the historian of science (and vice versa): reflections on "form"

Abstract: This essay surveys recent discussion of the problem of form in literary studies, identifies several ways in which the notion of form might be expanded, and suggests ways in which such an expanded category of form might be useful to historians of science and literary critics alike.

Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing, Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value

Abstract: Emphasizing how modes of book production, promotion, and consumption shape ideas of literary value, Edward Mack examines the role of Japan’s publishing industry in defining modern Japanese literature In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as cultural and economic power consolidated in Tokyo, the city’s literary and publishing elites came to dominate the dissemination and preservation of Japanese literature As Mack explains, they conferred cultural value on particular works by creating prizes and multivolume anthologies that signaled literary merit One such anthology, the Complete Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature (published between 1926 and 1931), provided many readers with their first experience of selected texts designated as modern Japanese literature The low price of one yen per volume allowed the series to reach hundreds of thousands of readers An early prize for modern Japanese literature, the annual Akutagawa Prize, first awarded in 1935, became the country’s highest-profile literary award Mack chronicles the history of book production and consumption in Japan, showing how advances in technology, the expansion of a market for literary commodities, and the development of an extensive reading community enabled phenomena such as the Complete Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature and the Akutagawa Prize to manufacture the very concept of modern Japanese literature

Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory From 1950 to the Early 21st Century

Abstract: Theory After Theory provides an overview of developments in literary theory after 1950. It is intended both as a handbook for readers to learn about theory and an intellectual history of the recent past in literary criticism for those interested in seeing how it fits in with the larger culture. Accessible but rigorous, this book provides a wealth of historical and intellectual context that allows the reader to make sense of the movements in recent literary theory.

American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900

Abstract: This book examines literary authorship in the twentieth century and covers such topics as publishing, book distribution, the trade editor, the literary agent, the magazine market, subsidiary rights, and the blockbuster mentality.

Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule

Abstract: Said’s Orientalism inspired several generations of scholars to study the English novel’s close involvement with colonialism, they have not considered how English novels themselves were radically altered by colonialism. In Educating Seeta, Shuchi Kapila argues that the paradoxes of indirect rule in British India were negotiated in “family romances” which encoded political struggle in the language of domestic and familial civility. A mixture of domestic ideology and liberal politics, these are Anglo-Indian romances, written by British colonials who lived in India during a period of indirect colonial rule. Instead of providing neat conclusions and smooth narratives, they become a record of the limits of liberal colonialism. They thus offer an important supplement to Victorian novels, extend the study of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and offer a new perspective on colonial culture. Kapila demonstrates that popular writing about India and, by implication, other colonies is an important supplement to the high Victorian novel and indispensable to our understanding of nineteenth-century English literature and culture. Her nuanced study of British writing about indirect rule in India will reshape our understanding of Victorian domestic ideologies, class formation, and gender politics.

Doing literary criticism : helping students engage with challenging texts

Abstract: One of the greatest challenges for English language arts teachers today is the call to engage students in more complex texts. Tim Gillespie, who has taught in public schools for almost four decades, has found the lenses of literary criticism a powerful tool for helping students tackle challenging literary texts. Tim breaks down the dense language of critical theory into clear, lively, and thorough explanations of many schools of critical thought - reader response, biographical, historical, psychological, archetypal, genre based, moral, philosophical, feminist, political, formalist, and postmodern. Doing Literary Criticism gives each theory its own chapter with a brief, teacher-friendly overview and a history of the approach, along with an in-depth discussion of its benefits and limitations. Each chapter also includes ideas for classroom practices and activities. Using stories from his own English classes - from alternative programs to advanced placement and everything in between - Tim provides a wealth of specific classroom-tested suggestions for discussion, essay and research paper topics, recommended texts, exam questions, and more. The accompanying CD offers abbreviated overviews of each theory (designed to be used as classroom handouts), examples of student work, collections of quotes to stimulate discussion and writing, an extended history of women writers, and much more. Ultimately, Doing Literary Criticism offers teachers a rich set of materials and tools to help their students become more confident and able readers, writers, and critical thinkers.

Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy

Abstract: An understanding of contemporary North Korea's literature is virtually impossible without an investigation of its formative period, 1945-1960, which saw a gradual transformation from the initial 'Soviet era' to a Korean version of 'national Stalinism'. This turbulent epoch established a long-lasting framework for North Korean literature and set up an elaborate system of political control over literary matters, as well as over the people who served in this field. "Soldiers on the Cultural Front" presents the first consistent research on the early history of North Korea's literature and literary policy in Western scholarship. It traces the introduction and development of Soviet-organized conventions in North Korean literary propaganda and investigates why the 'romance with Moscow' was destined to be short lived. It reconstructs the biographies and worldviews of major personalities who shaped North Korean literature and teases these historical figures out of popular scholarly myth and misconception. The book also investigates the specific forms of control over intellectuals and literary matters in North Korea. Considering the unique phenomenon of North Korean literary critique, the author analyzes the political campaigns and purges of 1947-1960 and investigates the role of North Korean critics as 'political executioners' in these events. She draws on an impressive variety and number of sources - ranging from interviews with Korean and Soviet participants, public and family archives, and memoirs to original literary and critical texts - to present a balanced and eye-opening work that will benefit those interested in not only understanding North Korean literature and society, but also rethinking forms of socialist modernity elsewhere in the world.

Critical Empiricism: Reading Data With Social Theory

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