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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... narrative . The unity in relation to which the felt discontinu- ities must be brought into line is therefore a psychological unity ; the drama whose coherence everyone is in the business of demonstrating is mental . ( this volume ) ...
... narrative that erases the confusions that are , after all , a primary indicator of history itself . Greenblatt speaks to these confusions in the introduction to his collection of essays Learning to Curse , calling them instead ...
... narratives about the degeneracy of academic discourse in the humanities " ) , is skeptical of one aspect of the method , such as she sees it , of the New Histori- cism , with which Gallagher and Greenblatt are generally associated . She ...
... narrative fiction precisely because it effectively objectifies , even as it sustains and hides , the subjectivity of the author . Put another way , in the novels Austen questions and criticizes her own aesthetic and ironic sensibilities ...
... narrative with a double - edge which like the colored South African subject represents a hybridity , a difference ' within . ' " He comments on " the freak displacements of these novels , [ in which ] the profound divisions of an ...