Jonathan Culler

A brief introduction to literary theory that explores the various moves that literary theory has encouraged.

A Very Short Introduction

Literary Theory

Roland Barthes was the leading figure of French Structuralism, the theoretical movement of the 1960s which revolutionized the study of literature and culture, as well as history and psychoanalysis. But Barthes was a man who disliked orthodoxies. His shifting positions and theoretical interests make him hard to grasp and assess. This book surveys Barthes' work in clear, accessible prose, highlighting what is most interesting and important in his work today.

Barthes: A Very Short Introduction

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Examining ancient and modern poems from Sappho to Ashbery, Jonathan Culler reveals the limitations of these two models—the Romantic and the modern—and challenges the assumption that poems exist to be interpreted.

Theory of the Lyric

Richard Rorty

Umberto Eco

Christine Brooke-Rose

This book brings together some of the most distinguished figures currently at work in philosophy, literary theory and criticism to debate the limits of interpretation.

Interpretation and Overinterpretation

Breve introducción a la teoría literaria

En las ricas páginas de esta Breve introducción, Jonathan Culler pasa revista a los grandes asuntos que han interesado históricamente a la teoría literaria (la pregunta «¿qué es literatura?», el carácter de la ficción, el lenguaje literario y las figuras retóricas, la poesía y la narrativa...), a la vez que se hace eco de la evolución de la disciplina hacia unos horizontes que superan lo meramente literario y la sitúan en un intenso debate sobre cuestiones tan trascendentales como el poder, el género sexual o la raza. Este volumen, indispensable para quien quiera adentrarse en uno de los campos más dinámicos de las humanidades, se completa con un panorama histórico sobre las principales corrientes críticas del siglo XX (desde el formalismo ruso al nuevo historicismo o los estudios culturales) y una útil bibliografía comentada.

Pheng Cheah

Benedict Anderson, professor at Cornell and specialist in Southeast Asian studies, is best known for his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991). It is no understatement to say that this is one of the most influential books of the last twenty years. Widely read both by social scientists and humanists, it has become an unavoidable document. For people in the humanities, Anderson is particularly interesting because he explores the rise of nationalism in connection with the rise of the novel.

Around the Work of Benedict Anderson

Grounds of Comparison

Yazin Kurami

Includes new preface and additional bibliographical references.

Theory and Criticism After Structuralism

On Deconstruction

To gain a deeper understanding of the literary movement that has dominated recent Anglo-American literary criticism, The Pursuit of Signs is a must. In a world increasingly mediated, it offers insights into our ways of consuming texts that are both brilliant and bold. Dancing through semiotics, reader-response criticism, the value of the apostrophe and much more, Jonathan Culler opens up for every reader the closed world of literary criticism. Its impact on first publication, in 1981, was immense; now, as Mieke Bal notes, 'the book has the same urgency and acuity that it had then', though today it has even wider implications: 'with the interdisciplinary turn taking hold, literary theory itself, through this book, becomes a much more widespread tool for cultural analysis'.

The Pursuit of Signs

Ben Glaser

This book shows how rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understanding poetry. Intervening in recent debates over formalism, historicism, and poetics, the authors show how rhythm is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. Distinct from the related terms to which it’s often assimilated—scansion, prosody, meter—rhythm makes legible a range of ways poetry affects us that cannot be parsed through the traditional resources of poetic theory. Rhythm has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics. But there are reasons to understand and even embrace its seductions, including its resistance to lyrical voice and even identity. Through exploration of rhythm’s genealogies and present critical debates, the essays consistently warn against taking rhythm to be a given form offering ready-made resources for interpretation. Pressing beyond poetry handbooks’ isolated descriptions of technique or inductive declarations of what rhythm “is,” the essays ask what it means to think rhythm. Rhythm, the contributors show, happens relative to the body, on the one hand, and to language, on the other—two categories that are distinct from the literary, the mode through which poetics has tended to be analyzed. Beyond articulating what rhythm does to poetry, the contributors undertake a genealogical and theoretical analysis of how rhythm as a human experience has come to be articulated through poetry and poetics. The resulting work helps us better understand poetry both on its own terms and in its continuities with other experiences and other arts. Contributors: Derek Attridge, Tom Cable, Jonathan Culler, Natalie Gerber, Ben Glaser, Virginia Jackson, Simon Jarvis, Ewan Jones, Erin Kappeler, Meredith Martin, David Nowell Smith, Yopie Prins, Haun Saussy

The Poetics of a Literary Life Form

Critical Rhythm

Johan Svedjedal

en mycket kort introduktion

Litteraturteori

Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson

With an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considered deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader-response criticism. On Deconstruction is both an authoritative synthesis of Derrida's thought and an analysis of the often-problematic relation between his philosophical writings and the work of literary critics. Culler's book is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in understanding modern critical thought. This edition marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first publication of this landmark work and includes a new preface by the author that surveys deconstruction's history since the 1980s and assesses its place within cultural theory today.

David Tee

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