Literature, Literary Criticism and National Development

Literature, Literary Criticism and National Development
Author: Nnolim, Charles E.
Publisher: Malthouse Press
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2016-03-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9785325083

The lectures in this book were delivered at significant points in Professor Nnolim’s career. ‘Literature and the Common Welfare’ (1988) was his inaugural lecture, his declaration that he had come of age as an academic, as a young Professor of literature. In August 2000, he delivered ‘Literature, the Arts and Cultural Development’ to announce his induction as a member of the Nigerian Academy of Letters in which he was finally admitted as a Fellow in 2005. In this lecture, Nnolim makes strong claims about the validity of literature in Nigeria’s national life. In August, 2007, Professor Nnolim delivered ‘The Writer’s Responsibility and Literature in National Development’. Here he re-emphasizes the importance of literary studies in Nigeria’s national life and goes on to lament the total neglect of Nigeria’s artists, writers, and world class intellectuals in national life. The fourth lecture, ‘Morning Yet on Criticism Day: the Criticism of African Literature in the Twentieth Century’, was given as a laureate of the Nigerian National Merit Award, 2009. It unifies Professor Nnolim’s various pleas for the role of literature in national development but particularly re-emphasizing the problem of language in Nigeria’s creative writing and urging governmental intervention in the matter.

Critical Encounters in Secondary English

Critical Encounters in Secondary English
Author: Deborah Appleman
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2015-04-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0807773557

Because of the emphasis placed on nonfiction and informational texts by the Common Core State Standards, literature teachers all over the country are re-evaluating their curriculum and looking for thoughtful ways to incorporate nonfiction into their courses. They are also rethinking their pedagogy as they consider ways to approach texts that are outside the usual fare of secondary literature classrooms. The Third Edition of Critical Encounters in Secondary English provides an integrated approach to incorporating nonfiction and informational texts into the literature classroom. Grounded in solid theory with new field-tested classroom activities, this new edition shows teachers how to adapt practices that have always defined good pedagogy to the new generation of standards for literature instruction. New for the Third Edition: A new preface and new introduction that discusses the CCSS and their implications for literature instruction. Lists of nonfiction texts at the end of each chapter related to the critical lens described in that chapter. A new chapter on new historicism, a critical lens uniquely suited to interpreting nonfiction and informational sources. New classroom activities created and field-tested specifically for use with nonfiction texts. Additional activities that demonstrate how informational texts can be used in conjunction with traditional literary texts. “What a smart and useful book!” —Mike Rose, University of California, Los Angeles “[This book] has enriched my understanding both of teaching literature and of how I read. I know of no other book quite like it.” —Michael W. Smith, Temple University, College of Education “I have recommended Critical Encounters to every group of preservice and practicing teachers that I have taught or worked with and I will continue to do so.” —Ernest Morrell, director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME), Teachers College, Columbia University

Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics

Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics
Author: Averroës
Publisher:
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2000
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

Aristotle's Poetics has held the attention of scholars and authors through the ages, and Averroes has long been known as "the commentator" on Aristotle. His Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics is important because of its striking content. Here, an author steeped in Aristotle's thought and highly familiar with an entirely different poetical tradition shows in careful detail what is commendable about Greek poetics and commendable as well as blameworthy about Arabic poetics.

Combined and Uneven Development

Combined and Uneven Development
Author: Warwick Research Collective
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2015
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1781381895

The ambition of this book is to resituate the problem of 'world literature', considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. This theory has a long pedigree in the social sciences, where it continues to stimulate debate. But its implications for cultural analysis have received less attention, even though the theory might be said to draw attention to a central -perhaps the central - arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development, on the one hand, and the recently interrogated and expanded categories of 'world literature' and 'modernism', on the other, that this book looks for its specific contours. In the two theoretical chapters that frame the book, the authors argue for a single, but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature. In the four substantive chapters that then follow, the authors explore a selection of modern-era fictions in which the potential of their method of comparativism seems to be most dramatically highlighted. They treat the novel paradigmatically, not exemplarily, as a literary form in which combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies as a 'modernising' import. The peculiar plasticity and hybridity of the novel form enables it to incorporate not only multiple literary levels, genres and modes, but also other non-literary and archaic cultural forms - so that, for example, realist elements might be mixed with more experimental modes of narration, or older literary devices might be reactivated in juxtaposition with more contemporary frames.

J.M. Robertson

J.M. Robertson
Author: Odin Dekkers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429836597

Published in 1998, J. M. Robertson: Rationalist and Literary Critic is a study of the life of one of the most erudite and prolific critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Scotsman John MacKinnon Robertson (1856-1933), rationalist and enemy of religion to the core, published over one hundred books and thousands of articles in fields as diverse as sociology, economics, history, anthropology, biblical criticism and literary criticism. This once widely known (and feared!) author was all too quickly forgotten after his death and his work is now seldom read. The aim of this book is to demonstrate that Robertson’s writings and in particular his acute and powerful literary criticism – much respected by T. S. Eliot – have not lost their relevance for late twentieth century readers. Moreover, through the examinations of Robertson’s work in its contextual framework, this study provides a wide-ranging perspective on the late-Victorian literary scene, which perhaps present-day literary historians have not given the detailed attention it deserves.

The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1917-1930)

The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1917-1930)
Author: Marián Gálik
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2022-05-18
Genre: Chinese literature
ISBN: 9781032250700

This book, first published in 1980, is a history of modern Chinese literary criticism between the years 1917 and 1930. It examines its development within the framework of Chinese national literature undergoing a literary revolution in as well as that of world literature and the impact of progressive literary criticism.

Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation

Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation
Author: Sarah Beth Hunt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2014-08-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317559517

This study explores how Dalits in north India have used literature as a means of protest against caste oppression. Including fresh ethnographic research and interviews, it traces the trajectory of modern Dalit writing in Hindi and its pivotal role in the creation, rise and reinforcement of a distinctive Dalit identity. The book challenges the existing impression of Hindi Dalit literature as stemming from the Dalit political assertion of the 1980s and as being chiefly imitative of the Marathi Dalit literature model. Arguing that Hindi Dalit literature has a much longer history in north India, it examines two differing strands that have taken root in Dalit expression — the early ‘popular’ production of smaller literary pamphlets and journals at the beginning of the 20th century and more contemporary modes such as autobiographies, short stories and literary criticism. The author highlights the ways in which such various forms of literary works have supported the proliferation of an all-encompassing identity for the so-called ‘untouchable’ castes. She also underscores how these have contributed to their evolving political consciousness and consolidation of newer heterogeneous identities, making a departure from their long-perceived image. The work will be important for those in Dalit studies, subaltern history, Hindi literature, postcolonial studies, political science and sociology as well as the informed general reader.

The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature

The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature
Author: James H. Cox
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 769
Release: 2014-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199914044

Over the course of the last twenty years, Native American and Indigenous American literary studies has experienced a dramatic shift from a critical focus on identity and authenticity to the intellectual, cultural, political, historical, and tribal nation contexts from which these Indigenous literatures emerge. The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature reflects on these changes and provides a complete overview of the current state of the field. The Handbook's forty-three essays, organized into four sections, cover oral traditions, poetry, drama, non-fiction, fiction, and other forms of Indigenous American writing from the seventeenth through the twenty-first century. Part I attends to literary histories across a range of communities, providing, for example, analyses of Inuit, Chicana/o, Anishinaabe, and Métis literary practices. Part II draws on earlier disciplinary and historical contexts to focus on specific genres, as authors discuss Indigenous non-fiction, emergent trans-Indigenous autobiography, Mexicanoh and Spanish poetry, Native drama in the U.S. and Canada, and even a new Indigenous children's literature canon. The third section delves into contemporary modes of critical inquiry to expound on politics of place, comparative Indigenism, trans-Indigenism, Native rhetoric, and the power of Indigenous writing to communities of readers. A final section thoroughly explores the geographical breadth and expanded definition of Indigenous American through detailed accounts of literature from Indian Territory, the Red Atlantic, the far North, Yucatán, Amerika Samoa, and Francophone Quebec. Together, the volume is the most comprehensive and expansive critical handbook of Indigenous American literatures published to date. It is the first to fully take into account the last twenty years of recovery and scholarship, and the first to most significantly address the diverse range of texts, secondary archives, writing traditions, literary histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field.