Preface
Introduction
PART I. CLASSIC TEXTS IN LITERARY CRITICISM
Plato, Republic Book X
Ion
*from Phaedrus
*DIALOGUE: To Plato
Leo Tolstoy, from What Is Art?
Aristotle, Poetics
Horace, The Art of Poetry
Longinus, from On the Sublime
Plotinus, On the Intellectual Beauty
Dante Alighieri, from the Letter to Can Grande della Scala
Christine de Pisan, from the Querelle de la Rose
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry
John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
Aphra Behn, An Epistle to the Reader from The Dutch Lover
Preface to The Lucky Chance
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 4;
Rasselas, Chapter 10; from Preface to Shakespeare
David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste
*DIALOGUE: To David Hume
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, from Contingencies of Value
Immanuel Kant, from Critique of Judgment
*Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Germaine de Staël, Essay on Fictions
On Women Writers
Friedrich von Schiller, from On Naive and Sentimental Poetry
William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius
from Biographia Literaria 13 and 14
John Keats, from a Letter to Benjamin Bailey
from a Letter to George and Thomas Keats
*Thomas Love Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
*DIALOGUE: To Percy Shelley
Raymond Williams, from Culture and Society
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of Art
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet
Karl Marx, Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions from The German Ideology
The Alienation of Labor from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
On Greek Art from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
from The Study of Poetry
Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music
*from Twilight of the Idols
*from On Truth and Falsity in an Extra-Moral Sense
Henry James, The Art of Fiction
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Daydreaming;
*from The Interpretation of Dreams
*The "Uncanny"
*Medusa's Head
T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Carl Gustav Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
The Principal Archetypes
*W.E.B. Du Bois, On Double Consciousness from The Souls of Black Folk
*Criteria of Negro Art
Mikhail Bakhtin, from Discourse in the Novel
Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare's Sister
Austen -- Brontë -- Eliot
*The Androgynous Vision
*Zora Neale Hurston, What White Publishers Won't Print
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry
*Edmund Wilson, from "Dickens: The Two Scrooges"
from The Wound and the Bow
Kenneth Burke, Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats
Literature as Equipment for Living
F. R. Leavis, from The Great Tradition
Jean-Paul Sartre, Why Write?
Simone de Beauvoir, Myths: Of Women in Five Authors
*J. L. Austin, Constatives and Performatives from How to Do Things with Words
Northrop Frye, The Archetypes of Literature
Erich Auerbach, Odysseus's Scar
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Elevation of Historicality of Understanding to the Status of Hermeneutical Principle
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
PART II. CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN LITERARY CRITICISM
1. Formlisms: Russian Formalism, New Criticism,Neo-Aristotelianism
Victor Shklovsky, Art as Technique
*Vladimir Propp, "Transformations of the Wondertale" from The Morphology of the Folktale
*I. A. Richards, The Two Uses of Language
*Poetry and Beliefs
W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy
Cleanth Brooks, Irony as a Principle of Structure
*My Credo: Formalist Criticism
*DIALOGUE: To Cleanth Brooks
R. S. Crane, from "Cleanth Brooks, Or, The Bankruptcy of Critical Monism"
2. Structuralism and Deconstruction
Ferdinand de Saussure, Nature of the Linguistic Sign
*Binary Oppositions
*Roman Jacobson, from Linguistics and Poetics
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth
Umberto Eco, The Myth of Superman
Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
*The Father of Logos from Plato's Pharmacy
*Differance
Michel Foucault, What Is an Author?
Roland Barthes, from Work to Text
*Striptease from Mythologies
*The Structuralist Activity
*The Death of the Author
Paul de Man, Semiology and Rhetoric
*DIALOGUE: To the Poststructuralists
Lawrence Lipking, The Practice of Theory
3. Reader-Response Theory
Wolfgang Iser, The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach
*Hans Robert Jauss, The Three Stages of Interpretation
Norman N. Holland, The Question: Who Reads What How?
*Stanley Fish, How to Tell a Poem When You See One
*DIALOGUE: To Stanley Fish
James Phelan, from "Data, Danda, and Disagreement"
Judith Fetterley, Introduction to The Resisting Reader
Wayne C. Booth, Control of Distance in Jane Austen's Emma
Peter Rabinowitz, from Before Reading
*Mark Turner, Poetry: Metaphor and Invention
*Lisa Zunshine, Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness
*Elaine Scarry, On Vivacity
4. Psychonanalytic Theory and Criticism
Harold Bloom, A Meditation Upon Priority
Peter Brooks, Freud's Masterplot
Jacques Lacan, The Agency of the Letter
*The Mirror Stage
*The Meaning of the Phallus
*Slavoj Zizek,Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing.
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
*DIALOGUE: To Helene Cixous
Toril Moi, from Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture
5. Marxism
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Georg Lukàcs, The Ideology of Modernism
*Bertolt Brecht, The Popular and the Realistic
*Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception from Dialect of Enlightenment
*Louis Althusser, from Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Raymond Williams, from Marxism and Literature
Terry Eagleton, Categories for a Materialist Criticism
Fredric Jameson, from The Political Unconscious
6. New Historicism and Cultural Studies
Michel Foucault, Las Meninas from The Order of Things
*Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City from The Practice of Everyday Life
Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance
King Lear and Harsnett's "Devil-Fiction"
*DIALOGUE: On the New Historicism
Frank Lentricchia, from Ariel and the Police
*Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms
*Hayden White, The Historical Text as Literary Artifact
Nancy Armstrong, Some Call It Fiction: On the Politics of Domesticity
*Laura Kipnis, (Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler
John Guillory, from Cultural Capital
*Lawrence Buell, The Eco-Critical Insurgency
7. Feminist Criticism
*Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship
Annette Kolodny, Dancing Through the Minefield
*Julia Kristeva, Women's Time
Barbara Smith, Toward a Black Feminist Criticism
Nina Baym, Melodramas of Beset Manhood
*Jonathan Culler, Reading as a Woman
*DIALOGUE: To Jonathan Culler
Elaine Showalter, Critical Crossdressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year
Terry Eagleton, A Response to Elaine Showalter
Elaine Showalter, In Reply
8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory
*Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire
*Monique Wittig, One Is Not Born a Woman
Michel Foucault, from The History of Sexuality
*Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from Between Men
from Epistemology of the Closet
*Steven Kruger, Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale
*Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant, Sex in Public
Judith Butler, Imitation and Gender Insubordination
*DIALOGUE: To Judith Butler
Martha Nussbaum, from The Professor of Parody
*Judith Halberstam, The Making of Female Masculinity
9. Postcolonialism and Ethnic Studies
*Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, from Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Edward W. Said, Orientalism
*Benedict Anderson,Origins of National Consciousness from Imagined Communities
*Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa
*Homi Bhabha, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Dehli, May 1817
*Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism
*Ngugi wa Thiong'o Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship
*DIALOGUE: On "Third World" Literature
Frederic Jameson, from Third World Literature in the Era of Multi-National Capitalism
Aijaz Ahmad, from "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the "National Allegory"
Fredric Jameson, A Brief Response
*Barbara Christian, The Race for Theory
*DIALOGUE: To Barbara Christian
Michael Awkward, from Appropriative Gestures: Theory and Afro-American Literary Criticism
Deborah McDowell, from Recycling: Race, Gender, and the Practice of Theory
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Writing, "Race," and the Difference It Makes
*DIALOGUE: To Henry Louis Gates's "Signifyin' Monkey"
Houston Baker, from Blues, Ideology, and African American Literature
*Toni Morrison, Black Matter(s)
*Gloria Anzaldua, La consiencia de la mestiza: Toward a New Consciousness
*Rey Chow, The Interruption of Referentiality: Poststructuralism and the Conundrum of Critical Multiculturalism"
10. Theorizing Postmodernism
*Jean-Francois Lyotard, Defining the Postmodern
*Linda Hutcheon, Theorizing the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics
*Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society
*bell hooks, Postmodern Blackness
*Cornel West, Postmodernism and Black America
*Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations
*Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
*DIALOGUE: To Postmodernists:
Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity: An Incomplete Project"
Chronological Contents
Index
*new to this edition