1315835487 (electronic bk.)

9781315835488 (electronic bk.)

0582784549

9780582784543

Harlow, England ; New York : Pearson Longman, 2008.

©2008

The purpose of the collection remains that of introducing the reader to the guiding concepts of contemporary literary and cultural debate. It does so by presenting substantial extracts from seminal thinkers and surrounding them with the contextual materials necessary to a full understanding. Each selection has a headnote, which gives biographical details of the author and provides suggestions for further reading, and footnotes that help explain difficult references. The collection is ordered both historically and thematically and readers are encouraged to draw for themselves connections between essays and theories.

This third edition of Modern Criticism and Theory represents a major expansion on its previous incarnations with twenty-five new pieces or essays included. This expansion has two principal purposes. Firstly, in keeping with the collection's aim to reflect contemporary preoccupations, the Reader has expanded forward to include such newly emergent considerations as ecocriticism and post-theory. Secondly, with the aim of presenting as broad an account of modern theory as possible, the reader expands backwards to take in exemplary pieces by formative writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Marx, Freud and Virginia Woolf. This radical expansion of content is prefaced by a wide-ranging introduction, which provides a rationale for the collection and demonstrates how connections can be made between different theories and critical schools.

Contents arranged historically. 1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Preface, and The premisses of the materialist method, from The German Ideology

2. Ferdinand de Saussure

The object of study

3. Sigmund Freud

The premisses and technique of interpretation, and Manifest and latent elements, from Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

4. Walter Benjamin

The task of the translator

5. Virginia Woolf

Chapter Two of A Room of One's Own

6. Simone de Beauvoir

Myth and reality, and Woman's situation and character, from The Second Sex

7. Frantz Fanon

The negro and language, from Black Skin, White Masks

8. Roman Jakobson

Linguistics and poetics

The metaphoric and metonymic poles

9. Bertolt Brecht

Study of the first scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus

10. Jacques Lacan

The insistence of the letter in the unconscious

11. Jacques Derrida

Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences

12. Tzvetan Todorov

The typology of detective fiction

13. Mikhail Bakhtin

From the prehistory of novelistic discourse

14. E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

In defense of the author, from Validity of Interpretation

15. Michel Foucault

What is an author?

16. Wolfgang Iser

The reading process: a phenomenological approach

17. Roland Barthes

The death of the author

Textual analysis: Poe's 'Valdemar'

18. Raymond Williams

Country and city, and A problem of perspective, from The Country and the City

19. Julia Kristeva

The ethics of linguistics

20. Hélène Cixous

Sorties

21. Edward Said

Crisis [in orientalism]

22. Stanley Fish

Interpreting the Variorum

23. J. Hillis Miller

The critic as host

24. Jean-Franc̦ois Lyotard

What is postmodernism?

25. Jean Baudrillard

Simulacra and simulations

26. Paul de Man

The resistance to theory

27. Geoffrey Hartman

The interpreter's Freud

28. Umberto Eco

Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage

29. Michael Riffaterre

Transposing presuppositions on the semiotics of literary translation

30. Patrocinio P. Schweickart

Reading ourselves: toward a feminist theory of reading

31. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

The beast in the closet

32. Luce Irigaray

The bodily encounter with the mother

33. Fredric Jameson

Postmodernism and consumer society

34. Stephen Greenblatt

The circulation of social energy

35. Jerome McGann

The textual condition

36. Stuart Hall

New ethnicities

37. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Questions of multiculturalism, and The post-colonial critic

38. Judith Butler

Critically queer, from Bodies That Matter

39. Malcom Bowie

Freud and the European unconscious, from Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory

40. Jeffrey Weeks

The sphere of the intimate and the values of everyday life, from Invented Moralities

41. Lawrence Buell

Place, from The Environmental Imagination

42. Slavoj Žižek

Fantasy as a political category: a Lacanian approach

43. Meyda Yeǧenoǧlu

The battle of the veil: woman between orientalism and nationalism, from Colonial Fantasies

44. David Scott Kastan

From codex to computer; or, presence of mind, from Shakespeare and the Book

45. Alexander Stille

Writing and the creation of the past, from The Future of the Past

46. Valentine Cunningham

Touching reading from Reading After Theory

47. Jacqueline Rose

Daddy

48. Terry Eagleton

The rise and fall of theory, from After Theory.

Criticism > History > 20th century.

Criticism > History > 21st century.

Literature > History and criticism > Theory, etc.