Professing Criticism

Professing Criticism
Author: John Guillory
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226821315

A sociological history of literary study—both as a discipline and as a profession. As the humanities in higher education struggle with a labor crisis and with declining enrollments, the travails of literary study are especially profound. No scholar has analyzed the discipline’s contradictions as authoritatively as John Guillory. In this much-anticipated new book, Guillory shows how the study of literature has been organized, both historically and in the modern era, both before and after its professionalization. The traces of this volatile history, he reveals, have solidified into permanent features of the university. Literary study continues to be troubled by the relation between discipline and profession, both in its ambivalence about the literary object and in its anxious embrace of a professionalism that betrays the discipline’s relation to its amateur precursor: criticism. In a series of timely essays, Professing Criticism offers an incisive explanation for the perennial churn in literary study, the constant revolutionizing of its methods and objects, and the permanent crisis of its professional identification. It closes with a robust outline of five key rationales for literary study, offering a credible account of the aims of the discipline and a reminder to the professoriate of what they already do, and often do well.

Professing Literature

Professing Literature
Author: Gerald Graff
Publisher: Chicago : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 1987
Genre: Education
ISBN:

A paper reprint of the 1987 original in which Graff (humanities and Egnlish, Northwestern University) traces the history of the rise and development of academic literary studies in teh US. A detailed account of the forgotten and infamous figures and the frustrations and accomplishments that have shaped American English departments, the book is also a study in literary theory. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Cultural Capital

Cultural Capital
Author: John Guillory
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2023-10-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226830608

An enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory’s formative text on the literary canon. Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge on which culture has long been based. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups and more as a question of the distribution of cultural capital in schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing. Now, as the crisis of the canon has evolved into the so-called crisis of the humanities, Guillory’s groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this enlarged edition: “Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation—these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.”

Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism
Author: Joseph North
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017-05-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674967739

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. The Critical Revolution Turns Right -- 2. The Scholarly Turn -- 3. The Historicist/Contextualist Paradigm -- 4. The Critical Unconscious -- Conclusion: The Future of Criticism -- Appendix: The Critical Paradigm and T.S. Eliot -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Professing Feminism

Professing Feminism
Author: Daphne Patai
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2003
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780739104552

In this new and expanded edition of their controversial 1994 book, the authors update their analysis of what's gone wrong with Women's Studies programs. Their three new chapters provide a devastating and detailed examination of the routine practices found in feminst teaching and research.

Professing Criticism

Professing Criticism
Author: John Guillory
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2023-01-13
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0226821307

"As the humanities in higher education struggle with a jobs crisis and declining enrollments, the travails of "English" have been especially acute and long-standing. No scholar has analyzed the discipline's contradictions as authoritatively as John Guillory, whose 1993 book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation remains a classic and whose subsequent essays on the profession of literary study have been widely cited. In this much-anticipated new book, Guillory shows how literary study has been organized, both historically and in the modern era, both before and after its professionalization. The traces of this volatile history, he shows, have solidified into permanent features of the university. Yet the discipline continues to be troubled by the relation between discipline and profession, both in its ambivalence about the literary object and in its anxious embrace of a professionalism that betrays the discipline's relation to its amateur precursor: criticism. In a series of essays, several previously unpublished, Guillory unpacks what it means to "profess criticism." His book gives a timely and incisive explanation for the perennial churn in literary study, the constant revolutionizing of its methods and objects, and the permanent crisis of its professional identification. It closes with a robust outline of five key rationales for literary study, offering a credible account of the aims of the discipline and a reminder to the professoriate of what they already do, and often do well"--

The Worlds of Classical Chinese Aesthetics

The Worlds of Classical Chinese Aesthetics
Author: Paul R. Goldin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2024-03-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1003861334

This book presents the foundations of classical Chinese aesthetic discourse - roughly from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages - with the following animating questions: What is art? Why do we produce it? How do we judge it? The arts that garnered the most theoretical attention during this time period were music, poetry, calligraphy, and painting, and this book considers the reasons why these four were privileged. Whereas modern artists most likely consider themselves musicians or poets or calligraphers or painters or sculptors or architects, the pre-modern authors who produced the literature that established Chinese aesthetics prided themselves on being wenren, “cultured people,” conversant with all forms of art and learning. Other comparisons with Western theories and works of art are presented at due junctures. Key Features Addresses Chinese aesthetic discourse on its own terms Provides comparisons of key concepts and theories with examples from Western sources Includes more coverage of primary sources than any other English-language book on the subject Each chapter opens with a helpful summary, highlighting the chapter’s key themes

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives
Author: Jamie Callison
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2024-06-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350450596

Providing a broad, definitive account of how the 'archival turn' in humanities scholarship has shaped modernist studies, this book also functions as an ongoing 'practitioner's toolkit' (including useful bibliographical resources) and a guide to avenues for future work. Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and 'non-canonical' authors and networks within the 'New Modernist Studies'. This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies. Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H.D., James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism

The Rebuke of History

The Rebuke of History
Author: Paul V. Murphy
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2003-01-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0807875546

In 1930, a group of southern intellectuals led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren published I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. A stark attack on industrial capitalism and a defiant celebration of southern culture, the book has raised the hackles of critics and provoked passionate defenses from southern loyalists ever since. As Paul Murphy shows, its effects on the evolution of American conservatism have been enduring as well. Tracing the Agrarian tradition from its origins in the 1920s through the present day, Murphy shows how what began as a radical conservative movement eventually became, alternately, a critique of twentieth-century American liberalism, a defense of the Western tradition and Christian humanism, and a form of southern traditionalism--which could include a defense of racial segregation. Although Agrarianism failed as a practical reform movement, its intellectual influence was wide-ranging, Murphy says. This influence expanded as Ransom, Tate, and Warren gained reputations as leaders of the New Criticism. More notably, such "neo-Agrarians" as Richard M. Weaver and M. E. Bradford transformed Agrarianism into a form of social and moral traditionalism that has had a significant impact on the emerging conservative movement since World War II.

Shakespeare and the World of “Slings & Arrows”

Shakespeare and the World of “Slings & Arrows”
Author: Gary Kuchar
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2024-10-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0228023211

Slings & Arrows, starring Susan Coyne, Paul Gross, Don McKellar, and Mark McKinney as members of the New Burbage Theatre Festival, was heralded by television critics as one of the best shows ever produced and one of the finest depictions of life in classical theatre. Shakespeare scholars, however, have been ambivalent about the series, at times even hostile. In Shakespeare and the World of “Slings & Arrows” Gary Kuchar situates the three-season series in its cultural and intellectual contexts. More than a roman à clef about Canada’s Stratford Festival, he shows, it is a privileged window onto major debates within Shakespeare studies and a drama that raises vital questions about the role of the arts in society. Kuchar reads the television show – ever fluctuating between faith and doubt in the power of drama – as an allegory of Peter Brook’s widely renowned account of modern theatre, The Empty Space, mirroring Brook’s distinction between holy theatre, a quasi-sacred vocation, and deadly theatre, a momentary entertainment. Combining contextualized interpretations of the series with subtle formalist readings, Kuchar explains how Slings & Arrows participates in a broader recuperation of humanist approaches to Shakespeare in contemporary scholarship. The result is a demonstration of how and why Shakespeare continues to provide not just entertainment, but equipment for living.