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 |
From inside the book
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... gives himself that name - to work of the later twentieth century concerned more with matters in essence political . The arrangement of these selections is not meant to make claims about critical progress or regress ; it is , however ...
... gives a good sense of what it entails in recounting his graduate stu- dent experience as a teaching assistant for " The Interpretation of Literature , " a course taught by Ruben Brower at Harvard in the 1950s . " Students , " writes de ...
... give to poetry.14 Brooks launches from this model of clarity into an almost line by line expli- cation of the poem that is as " cunningly argued " as the poem itself . The intel- lectual force of the argument is provided by Brooks's ...
... give readings of the " Ode on a Grecian Urn . " Second and strangely , their readings work in the same di- rection and share the same purpose : moving through the poem , and register- ing its developments and transformations , they ...
... gives is the only kind of truth which we are likely to get on this earth , and , furthermore , it is the only kind that we have to have . The names , dates , and special circumstances , the wealth of data - these the sylvan historian ...