Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Books & Reading

During the Cold War, the editor of Time magazine declared, "A good citizen is a good reader." As postwar euphoria faded, a wide variety of Americans turned to reading to understand their place in the changing world. Yet, what did it mean to be a good reader? And how did reading make you a good citizen?

In Reading America, Kristin L. Matthews puts into conversation a range of political, educational, popular, and touchstone literary texts to demonstrate how Americans from across the political spectrum -- including "great works" proponents, New Critics, civil rights leaders, postmodern...

During the Cold War, the editor of Time magazine declared, "A good citizen is a good reader." As postwar euphoria faded, a wide variety of Americans turned to reading to understand their place in the changing world. Yet, what did it mean to be a good reader? And how did reading make you a good citizen?

In Reading America, Kristin L. Matthews puts into conversation a range of political, educational, popular, and touchstone literary texts to demonstrate how Americans from across the political spectrum -- including "great works" proponents, New Critics, civil rights leaders, postmodern...

Contemporary popular music provides the soundtrack for a host of recent novels, but little critical attention has been paid to the intersection of these important art forms. Write in Tune addresses this gap by offering the first full-length study of the relationship between recent music and fiction. With essays from an array of international scholars, the collection focuses on how writers weave rock, punk, and jazz into their narratives, both to develop characters and themes and to investigate various fan and celebrity cultures surrounding contemporary music. Write in Tune...

Literature is rife with uncertainty. Literature is good for us. These two ideas about reading literature are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature's capacity to unsettle, perplex, and bewilder us, and literature's ethical value? To revive this question, C. Namwali Serpell proposes a return to William Empson's groundbreaking work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our own experience.

Taking as case studies experimental novels by Thomas...

For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literary and cultural theory. In "Periodizing Jameson, "Phillip E. Wegner builds upon Jameson s unique dialectical method to demonstrate the value of Jameson s tools periodization, the fourfold hermeneutic, and the Greimasian semiotic square, among others and to develop virtuoso readings of Jameson s own work and the history of the contemporary American university in which it unfolds.

Wegner shows how Jameson s work intervenes in particular social, cultural, and political situations, using his...

In thirty-four essays, this volume reconstructs the...

Since Aristotle's Poetics, the episode has been a vexed category of literary analysis, troubling any easy view of the subsumption of unwieldy narrative parts into well-plotted wholes. Garrett puts forward a new, dialectical theory of episodic form to recast this peculiar object of literary history, looking to the episode as a narrative unit smaller...