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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... rhetorical device ; and since he is able to accept it only as a cheap trick , he is forced into this dilemma . Either : Donne does not take love seriously ; here he is merely sharpening his wit as a sort of mechanical exercise . Or ...
... rhetorical force of the ar- gument is provided by the lucid , authoritative , decorous ( not stodgy ) style that Brooks shares with most of his New Critical confrères . No band of critics can touch them as writers . Ambiguity , paradox ...
... rhetorical questions that follow , and the " un- heard tonal felicity " served by the return to rhetorical questions in the fourth stanza ; to register formal order , as manifest in the third stanza , which as " the central stanza of ...
... rhetorically returning the favor . It is an approach taken by John Crowe Ransom in " Poetry : A Note on Ontology . " For ... rhetorical balance is obvious - that is , the game is given away neither to science nor to art . But these lines ...
... rhetorically balanced assessment of science and art , its meaning is thor- oughly tilted in favor of art ; and whatever its application to a general cultural problem , it is also a statement by one man stemming from his values and his ...