Read more
List of contents
Introduction: A Preliminary Guide to Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies.
I. WHAT IS LITERARY STUDIES?
Tradition and the Individual Talent, T. S. Eliot.
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, Northrop Frye.
Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation, Cornel West.
Introduction: The Humanist Myth, Gerald Gaff.
Lessons of History, Gauri Viswanathan.
II. WHAT IS LITERARY THEORY?
The Resistance to Theory, Paul de Man.
The Search for Grounds in Literary Study, J. Hillis Miller.
Postmodern Blackness, Bell Hooks.
Literary Theory and 'Third World Literature': Some Contexts, Aijaz Ahmad.
The Politics of Knowledge, Edward Said.
III. RHETORIC AND READER RESPONSE.
Interpreting the Variorum, Stanley Fish.
Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading, Patrocinio Schweichkart.
Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion, Barbara Johnson.
Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and Dreams of New Culture, Stuart Mouthrop.
IV. STRUCTURALISM AND SEMIOTICS.
Selections from Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure.
What is Criticism? Roland Barthes.
Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia, Louis Marin.
Semiotics and Experience, Teresa de Lauretis.
V. DECONSTRUCTION AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM.
Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin, Jonathan Culler.
The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils, Jacques Derrida.
What is an Author? Michel Foucault.
Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text, Catherine Belsey.
VI. PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS.
The Mirror Stage, Jacques Lacan.
Pschoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable to Interminable, Shoshana Felman.
Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire, Slavoj Zizek.
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey.
VII. HISTORICAL CRITICISM.
Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art, Mikhail Bakhtin (V.N. Volosinov).
Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory, Raymond Williams.
Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Stephen Jay Greenblatt.
The Occidental Alice, Nancy Armstrong.
VIII. FEMINISM AND GENDER STUDIES.
Reading Like a Feminist, Diana Fuss.
Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism, Cora Kaplan.
Homo-Narcissism; or Heterosexuality, Michael Warner.
IX. CULTURAL STUDIES.
From Culture to Hegemony, Dick Hebdige.
Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, Stuart Hall.
The Translations of Cultures, James Clifford.
A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, Donna Haraway.
Summary
This impressive and up-to-date collection of key essays on the most significant developments in late twentieth century literary and cultural criticism includes illuminating discussions of the trends and forces at work in these texts.
