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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... Structure of Complex Words [ 1951 ] ) . Poetic tension and its resolution was central to New Critical interest - which is a boon to the criticism , insofar as the active mind , somewhat belying its contemplative aspect , apparently is ...
... structure . This purpose tends toward psychic purgation , assuagement , or transcendence . In the case of the " Ode ... structures " dramatistically , " a move less obscure than it sounds . Remember that the essential fact of drama is ...
... structure and clarifies verbal ambiguity , Burke is just as likely in his formalism to sound less like a New Critic than like a classical rhetorician . To notice " the sweeping periodic sentence " beginning the poem , the " periodic ...
... structures , systems , and beliefs that have generated the terms themselves . Barthes , who knows this , early attacks the core of The Great Family of Man's myth of the universal human community . " This myth , " he writes , " functions ...
... structure . To read , de Man says , is " to respond to structures of language , " to " the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces . " At this level of structure , New Criticism does not merely meet theory , but is theory ...