What is literary theory? Is there a relationship between literature and culture? These are some of questions addressed by Jonathan Culler in this new edition of his highly popular Very Short Introduc
With an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considers deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader-response criticism. On Deconstruction is both
What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions
Roland Barthes (1915-80) was an 'incomparable enlivener of the literary mind' whose lifelong fascination was with 'the way people make their world intelligible'. He has a multifaceted claim to fame: t
A work of technical skill as well as outstanding literary merit, Structuralist Poetics was awarded the 1975 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. It was during the writing of
What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona?Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of
The primary task of literary theory, Jonathan Culler asserts in the new edition of his classic in this field, is not to illuminate individual literary works but to explain the system of literary signi
Structuralism is a broad intellectual movement in the humanities and social sciences that came to prominence in the 1960s. Representing the beginning of modern interdisciplinary work in what has come
Has theory neglected literature? Often literary and cultural theory, which goes by the nickname "Theory," has seemed to be the theory of everything except literature: theory of language, of sexuality,
Literary critic Culler (English and comparative literature, Cornell U.) argues that not only is literary theory alive and well, despite its many obituaries, but that such theory need not eclipse liter
From reviews of the first edition?"Academic literary crticism continues to be dominated by 'theory' and the struggle between deconstructionist and humanist approaches to the business of reading. Jonat
Is academic writing, particularly in the disciplines of literary theory and cultural studies, needlessly obscure? The claim has been widely circulated in the media and subject to passionate debate, b
Poststructuralists, cultural studies professors, literary critics, and other academic writers are frequently accused of being deliberately elitist and obfuscatory in their work, a charge that has led
Benedict Anderson, professor at Cornell and specialist in Southeast Asian studies, is best known for his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991). It is no
Rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understanding poetry, making legible a range of ways poetry affects us that cannot be parsed through the traditional resources of poetic theory. Rhythm ha
