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
Results 1-5 of 78
... once into the general context of human experience or history . Much more humbly or modestly , they were to start out from the baffle- ment that such singular turns of tone , phrase , and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive ...
... once it is beyond all earlier criticism in our language . It is a new criticism , and it has already some unity of method . . . . It is new , and I have tried to exhibit it for what it is worth .... But criticism is an ex- traordinarily ...
... once done by the best New Critics is cur- rently undervalued . The setting is the introduction to a book of essays looking at the changing elements of style in three poets : prosody in terms of its existen- tial meaning in Gerard Manley ...
... once it has been assimilated , it seems to apply to almost everything one reads when one attends to matters of form . This is the danger of any powerful theory , for such range of application cannot assure a theory's truth , though it ...
... once wrote ( he called it a " hymn " ) , is nothing less than the " organic centre of responses , " and Lentricchia in his essay is true to the poet's poetics . Always centered on " Anecdote of the Jar , " his responses range widely ...