Close Reading

Close Reading

The Reader

  • Author: Lentricchia, Frank; DuBois, Andrew; Ransom, John Crowe; Brooks, Cleanth; Burke, Kenneth
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822330264
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822384595
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2002
  • Month: December
  • Pages: 408
  • DDC: 820.9
  • Language: English
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

  • CONTENTS
  • Preface
  • Introduction. Andrew Dubois
  • FORMALISM (PLUS)
    • Poetry: A Note on Ontology. John Crowe Ransom
    • Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History Without Footnotes. Cleanth Brooks
    • Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats. Kenneth Burke
    • The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited. Murray Krieger
    • Examples of Wallace Stevens. R.P. Blackmur
    • How to Do Things with Wallace Stevens. Frank Lentricchia
    • Stevens and Keats’s "To Autumn." Helen Vendler
    • "Lycidas": A Poem Finally Anonymous. Stanley Fish
  • AFTER FORMALISM?
    • Literary History and Literary Modernity. Paul de Man
    • Acts of Cultural Criticism. Roland Barthes
    • Nostalgia for the Present. Fredric Jameson
    • The Mousetrap. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt
    • Jane Austen’s Cover Story (And Its Secret Agents). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
    • Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
    • Ulysses and the Twentieth Century. Franco Moretti
    • To Move Without Moving: An Analysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison’s Trueblood Episode. Houston A. Baker Jr.
    • The World and the Home. Homi Bhabha
  • Contributors
  • Acknowledgment of Copyrights
  • Index

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