Close Reading: The ReaderFrank Lentricchia, Andrew DuBois An anthology of exemplary readings by some of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics, Close Reading presents a wide range of responses to the question at the heart of literary criticism: how best to read a text to understand its meaning. The lively introduction and the selected essays provide an overview of close reading from New Criticism through poststructuralism, including works of feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, new historicism, and more. From a 1938 essay by John Crowe Ransom through the work of contemporary scholars, Close Reading highlights the interplay between critics—the ways they respond to and are influenced by others’ works. To facilitate comparisons of methodology, the collection includes discussions of the same primary texts by scholars using different critical approaches. The essays focus on Hamlet, “Lycidas,” “The Rape of the Lock,” Ulysses, Invisible Man, Beloved, Jane Austen, John Keats, and Wallace Stevens and reveal not only what the contributors are reading, but also how they are reading. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois’s collection is an essential tool for teaching the history and practice of close reading. Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Andrew DuBois, Stanley Fish, Catherine Gallagher, Sandra Gilbert, Stephen Greenblatt, Susan Gubar, Fredric Jameson, Murray Krieger, Frank Lentricchia, Franco Moretti, John Crowe Ransom, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Helen Vendler |
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... effect : It is a mistake not to study the document as if it existed alone . But this position initiates its own problems , for it is not so simple to know what should be studied in a work . The New Critics focused on what de Man ( in ...
... effect , to any criticism reducing the text solely to a symptom of cultural disease ; which re- duction , as you will see when you read his finale , runs the risk of being deeply inessential . A pattern emerges from the essays ...
... effect , institutionalized this tactic : the ekphrasis , or the imitation in literature of a work of plastic art . The object of imitation , as spatial work , becomes the metaphor for the temporal work which seeks to capture it in that ...
... yellow dabbed in the corner of an otherwise all - orange painting shows how much yellow was peeking through that painting all along . Such is the effect of this Barthesian parenthesis tossed off in the midst of Introduction 23.
... effect assumed across the board for each given lyric . In relation to lyric , to the ostensible expression of a particular consciousness , the possibility of a psychological unity is essential : it is the possibility of a critical ...