A Companion to Literary Theory E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1212

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Introduces readers to the modes of literary and cultural study of the previous half century A Companion to Literary Theory is a collection of 36 original essays, all by noted scholars in their field, designed to introduce the modes and ideas of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Arranged by topic rather than chronology, in order to highlight the relationships between earlier and most recent theoretical developments, the book groups its chapters into seven convenient sections: I. Literary Form: Narrative and Poetry; II. The Task of Reading; III. Literary Locations and Cultural Studies; IV. The Politics of Literature; V. Identities; VI. Bodies and Their Minds; and VII. Scientific Inflections. Allotting proper space to all areas of theory most relevant today, this comprehensive volume features three dozen masterfully written chapters covering such subjects as: Anglo-American New Criticism; Chicago Formalism; Russian Formalism; Derrida and Deconstruction; Empathy/Affect Studies; Foucault and Poststructuralism; Marx and Marxist Literary Theory; Postcolonial Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gender Theory; Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism; Cognitive Literary Theory; Evolutionary Literary Theory; Cybernetics and Posthumanism; and much more. * Features 36 essays by noted scholars in the field * Fills a growing need for companion books that can guide readers through the thicket of ideas, systems, and terminologies * Presents important contemporary literary theory while examining those of the past The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory will be welcomed by college and university students seeking an accessible and authoritative guide to the complex and often intimidating modes of literary and cultural study of the previous half century.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I: Literary Form: Narrative and Poetry

1 British and American New Criticism

References

2 Chicago Formalism

Aristotle and the

Synolon

Constructional Genre

The Hypothetico‐Deductive Method

Textual Autonomy

Instrumental Pluralism

The Second Generation: Booth, Rader, Sacks

The Third and Subsequent Generations

References

3 Russian Formalism

Context

Principles

Distractions

Poetry

“Prose”

Literary History

Defamiliarization

References

4 Structuralism and Semiotics

The Keplerian Turn

Structuralism(s)

Acknowledgements

References

5 Stylistics

What is Stylistics?

Why so Much Focus on Language?

Who is Stylistics

For

?

Stylistics as Grammar

Selectivity

Foregrounding, Patterning, and Iconic Aptness

Stylistic Practice and the Return of the Reader

Falsifiability and Standards of Proof

Disciplinary Maturity

When Does “Attention to Detail” Go too Far?

References

6 Contemporary Narrative Theory

Unnatural Narratology; or Narrative Theory and the Tradition of Non‐mimetic Narrative

Fictionality; or the Borders between Fiction and Non‐fiction, and Cross‐border Traffic

Theory of Mind or Mind‐Reading

Feminist and Queer Narrative Theories, Intersectionality, and Critique

Rhetorical Theory and the Narrative Communication Model

References

Part II: The Task of Reading

7 The Intention Debates

How Long Has This Been Going On?: History

Someone to Watch over Me: Grounding Interpretations

You Like Potato, I Like Potahto: Two Sides of the Issue

I Mean to Say: Intention

The Half of It Dearie Blues: Is/Ought

Take a Lesson from Me: Bearing

You Are You: Readers

Could You Use Me?: Dealings

By Strauss: Texts

On and On and On: Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References

8 Deconstruction

I

II

III

References

9 Reader‐Response Theory

Introduction

Stylistic Mastery

Neural Shakespeare: The Function Shift

Martindale and Dailey (1995): Disagreement Reviewed

Bortolussi and Dixon (2003): Literariness

References

10 Empathy Studies

Current scholarship and debates

Narrative of the Topic

Suggestions for Further Research

References

11 Contemporary Proposals about Reading in the Digital Age

Distant Reading and Computational Text Analysis

Post‐Critical Reading

Histories of Everyday Reading

Deformative Reading

The Contested Futures of Scholarly Reading

References

Part III: Literary Locations and Cultural Studies

12 The Location of Literature

The Serial Delimitation of Literature

The Location of Literature Today

The Literary System and its Trivium

The Literary System and the University

References

13 The Verbal and the Visual

The Problematic Legacy of Lessing

Reading Signs

Ekphrasis: Writing about Art

References

14 Foucault and Poststructuralism

Foucault and Poststructuralism

The Return to Thinking

Historically

The Return of Thinking About the Subject

The Emphasis on

Difference

The Return to Thinking Philosophically about Ethics

References

15 Cultural Studies

References

Part IV: The Politics of Literature

16 Nothing If Not Determined: Marxian Criticism in History

References

17 The Frankfurt School and Its Successors

The Frankfurt School and Cultural Studies

Conclusion

References

18 Althusser

References

19 New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

References

20 Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben

Encountering Heidegger

Levinas and Literature

Agamben’s Archaeology of Commandment

References

21 Postcolonial Theory

The Problem of Postcolonial Theory

The Anti‐Colonial Roots of Postcolonial Thought

From Poststructuralism to Postcolonial Theory

References

22 Globalization Studies

Introduction: What Is Globalization?

A New Role for the Imagination in Social Life

Globalization and Literary Studies

Acknowledgements

References

Part V: Identities

23 Race/Literature/Theory

References

24 Ethnic Studies

Introduction

Struggles Over Literatures

Reading Otherwise

Conclusion

References

25 Anglophone Feminisms

References

26 Gender Theory

The Interdisciplinarity of Gender Theory

Masculinity Studies

Transgender Studies

Femininities in the 1990s, Girlhood Studies

References

27 Queer Theory

Queering Gender/Sexuality

Queering Sociality

Critiques of Queer Theory, and Responses

The Reach of Queer Theory

References

28 Disability Studies

Disability as an Identity

Early Literary Disability Studies and Normalcy

Reading Disability

Recovering Disabled Writing

Going Forward: Disability and Intersectionality

References

29 Trauma Studies

Starting with Freud

Literary Trauma Theory: Caruth and the First Wave

Pluralistic Trauma Theory: A New Model

References

Part VI: Bodies and Their Minds

30 Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism

References

31 Lacanian Psychoanalytic Criticism

Methods for Reading Lacan

Subject to Texts?

Lacan’s Theory of Discourse

References

32 Archetypal Criticism

References

33 Cognitive Literary Criticism

Reading

Metaphor

Narrative and Fictional Worlds

Empathy and Other Minds

Imagery and the Question of Immersive Reading

Cognitive Poetics and Poetry

Postscript: Cognitive Historicism

References

Part VII: Scientific Inflections

34 Evolutionary Literary Theory

The Historical Provenance and Main Contentions of Evolutionary Literary Theory

The Institutional Position of Evolutionary Literary Scholars

Governing Ideas in Evolutionary Biology

The Evolution of Specifically Human Characteristics

The Adaptive Functions of Literature and the Other Arts

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

The Future

References

35 Ecocriticism

Early and Middle Years

Contentious Later Years

Ecocriticism’s Expanding Purview

References

36 Cybernetics and Posthumanism

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

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A COMPANION TO

LITERARY T HEORY

EDITED BY

DAVID H. RICHTER

This edition first published 2018© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Names: Richter, David H., 1945– editor.Title: A Companion to literary theory / edited by David H. Richter.Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2018. | Series: Blackwell companions to literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2017026962 (print) | LCCN 2017038425 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118958735 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118958759 (epub) | ISBN 9781118958674 (hardback)Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Modern–History and criticism–Theory, etc. | Literature–Philosophy. | Criticism. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General.Classification: LCC PN81 (ebook) | LCC PN81 .R55 2018 (print) | DDC 801/.95 23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026962

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Notes on Contributors

Siraj Ahmed is Associate Professor in the PhD program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and in English and Comparative Literature at Lehman College. He is author of Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities (2018) and The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India (2012), as well as essays in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Cultural Critique, Postcolonial Studies, and The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth‐Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (2009).

Michelle Balaev is Visiting Assistant Professor at Flinders University. Her research and teaching address topics in twentieth‐century American literature, psychology and literature, ecocriticism, and imperialism. Her publications have appeared in peer‐reviewed journals such as PMLA, American Literature, ISLE, Mosaic, Studies in the Humanities, and Composition Studies. Her books include The Nature of Trauma in American Novels (2012) and Contemporary Approaches to Literary Trauma Theory (2014).

Diana Brydon, FRSC, Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies and Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba, is currently investigating transnational literacies, new postcolonialisms, and decolonizing imaginaries in global contexts. She has published on postcolonial cultural and literary studies and how communities are adjusting to globalizing processes. In addition to books on authors Timothy Findley and Christina Stead, she has published the co‐authored Decolonising Fictions (1993) and edited Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2000). Co‐edited books include Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere? (2002), Renegotiating Community: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts (2008) and Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue. (2012). Current projects include a co‐edited special journal issue of Canada and Beyond on “Canada, Brazil, and Beyond,” developed out of the SSHRC‐funded “Brazil/Canada Knowledge Exchange” and a co‐edited book, Concurrences: Archives and Voices in Postcolonial Places for Brill.

Rachel Sagner Buurma is Associate Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College, where she works on the novel, book history, Victorian literature, twentieth‐century Anglo‐American literary criticism, and literary informatics. In‐progress projects relate to the research practices of nineteenth‐century novelists, the history of close reading, and the relation between the novel and social media. With Laura Heffernan, she is writing a new disciplinary history of English literary studies titled “The Teaching Archive.”

William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College. Among his publications is a monograph on American literary and cultural criticism, 1900–45, in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 5 (2003). He is a co‐editor of the Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (2nd edn., 2010), and, with Sylvan Barnet, he has co‐authored a wide variety of books on literature and composition. His recent publications include essays on Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, William Shakespeare, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather.

Joseph Carroll is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. His books include The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold (1983), Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism (1988), Evolution and Literary Theory (1994), Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (2004), Reading Human Nature (2011) and (co‐authored) Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (2012). He produced an edition of On the Origin of Species. His co‐edited volumes include Evolution, Literature, and Film (2010), and Darwin’s Bridge (2016). He edits the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture.

Karen Coats is Professor of English at Illinois State University. Her research relates multiple theoretical perspectives to children’s and young adult literature. She is author of Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature (2004), and co‐editor of The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders (2008); Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2010); and Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to Postfeminism (2016).

Thomas Foster is Professor of English at the University of Washington and the author of Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (2005), as well as numerous articles on science fiction, cyberpunk, and technoculture studies. His current research focuses on race, ethnicity, and technicity, and the status of utopian thought in contemporary culture.

Harold Fromm has a PhD from the University of Wisconsin‐Madison, has taught in half a dozen university English departments, published in journals both literary and scholarly, produced many essays and reviews, and four books, the most well‐known being The Ecocriticism Reader (1996, co‐edited with Cheryll Glotfelty), a pioneering collection of representative specimens of environmental writing. In recent years he has written on science subjects, particularly Darwinian, evolutionary, and philosophic, as well as music.

Margaret Galvan is an Assistant Professor of visual rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. She received her PhD in English with a film studies certificate from The Graduate Center, CUNY, in 2016. She is currently at work on a book, In Visible Archives of the 1980s, under contract with the University of Minnesota Press, which traces a genealogy of queer theory in 1980s feminism through representations of sexuality in visual culture.

Glen Robert Gill is Associate Professor of Humanities at Montclair State University. He is the author of Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth (2006) and the editor of Northrop Frye on Twentieth‐Century Literature for The Collected Works of Northrop Frye (2010). He has also published essays on Northrop Frye, C. G. Jung, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and J. R. R. Tolkien. He is currently editing the forthcoming Cultural History of Myth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Matthew K. Gold is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he serves as Advisor to the Provost for Digital Initiatives, Director of the CUNY Academic Commons, and Director of the GC Digital Scholarship Lab. He edited Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012) and recently co‐edited, with Lauren F. Klein, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. He is Vice President/President‐Elect of the Association for Computers and the Humanities.

David Gorman is Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. He has published in various formats on the history and theory of literary study, including essays, reviews, bibliographies, translations, and entries in reference works. His work has appeared in Poetics Today, Modern Literature Quarterly, Narrative, and Style (of which he was the editor). His bibliography of Russian Formalism in English appeared in Style 26 (1992), with a supplement in Style 29 (1995).

Marina Grishakova is Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Tartu (Estonia). She is the author of The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames (2006), co‐editor of Intermediality and Storytelling (with M.‐L. Ryan, 2010) and Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth‐Century Humanities (with S. Salupere, 2015), contributor to international volumes, such as Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction (2011), Literature, History and Cognition (2014) and many others.

John Guillory is Julius Silver Professor of English at New York University. He is the author of Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993) and other articles on the history of literary study and on Renaissance literature. He is currently at work on a book entitled “Close Reading: From Technique to Technology in Anglo‐American Criticism.”

James A. W. Heffernan, Professor of English Emeritus at Dartmouth College, has published widely on the relations between literature and visual art. His books include The Re‐Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner (1985), Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (1993), Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions (2006), and Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature (2104). He is also founding editor of Review 19.

Robert Kaufman is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley; he also teaches in, and is former co‐director of, the university’s interdisciplinary Program in Critical Theory. His research and teaching emphasize twentieth‐ to twenty‐first‐century American poetry in dialogue with Latin American, German, French, and British poetry; romantic and nineteenth‐century poetry and poetics; philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, and history of criticism (especially since Kant and romanticism); and Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the arts.

Suzanne Keen writes about narrative empathy. In addition to articles addressing the topic, her books include Empathy and the Novel (2007), Thomas Hardy’s Brains (2014), and Narrative Form: Revised and Expanded 2nd edition (2015). She is co‐editor of Contemporary Women's Writing, and has guest edited special issues of Poetics Today and Style. She serves as Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English and Dean of the College at Washington and Lee University.

Christopher Krentz is Associate Professor of English and of American Sign Language at the University of Virginia. He is the author of A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing 1816–1864 (2000), Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth‐Century American Literature (2007), and articles on disability in literature and culture.

Steven F. Kruger is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include Dreaming in the Middle Ages (1992), AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science (1996), Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America (1997, co‐edited with Deborah R. Geis), Queering the Middle Ages (2001, co‐edited with Glenn Burger), and The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (2006).

David S. Miall is Emeritus Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is interested in British Romantic literature, especially the psychological insights of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He also works across the boundaries of literature and psychology, studying processes of mind and feeling that help us understand what makes literary reading distinctively literary. He is the author of Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. 2006); online publications are available at http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall.

Warren Montag is the Brown Family Professor of European Literature at Occidental College, Los Angeles. His most recent works include Althusser and his Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War (2013) and (with Mike Hill) The Other Adam Smith (2014).

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy at Penn State University. His most recent books are Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 (2008), Post‐Postmodernism; Or, The Cultural Logic of Just‐in‐Time Capitalism (2012), and Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (2016).

Christopher Norris is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at Cardiff University in Wales. He has published more than forty books on topics in philosophy, literary theory, musicology and the history of ideas, including most recently Badiou’s Being and Event, Philosophy Outside‐In, and Deconstruction After All. A book of poems, The Cardinal's Dog, came out in 2013 and two further collections of verse—For the Tempus‐Fugitives (2017) and The Winnowing Fan (2017).

Daniel T. O’Hara, Professor of English and Humanities at Temple University, is the author of nine books, including Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime (2015). He is also the editor or co‐editor of six other books, including with Donald E. Pease and Michelle Martin, A William V. Spanos Reader: Humanistic Criticism and the Secular Imperative (2015). Currently, he is completing a book manuscript “The Revival of Roland Barthes: Literature Reborn.”

Neema Parvini is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Surrey. He is the author of five books: Shakespeare's History Plays: Rethinking Historicism (2012); Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (2012); Shakespeare and Cognition: Thinking Fast and Slow through Character (2015); Shakespeare and New Historicism Theory (2017); and Shakespeare's Moral Compass: Ethical Thinking in His Plays (forthcoming 2018).

James Braxton Peterson is the Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. He is the author of several books, The Hip Hop Underground and African American Culture (2014), Prison Industrial Complex for Beginners (2016), and Hip Hop Headphones: A Scholar’s Critical Playlist (2016). Peterson hosts “The Remix” on Philadelphia’s NPR affiliate, WHYY. “The Remix” is a podcast that engages issues at the intersection of race, politics, and popular culture.

James Phelan, Distinguished University Professor of English at Ohio State University, is the editor of Narrative and co‐editor of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. He has devoted much of his own scholarship to developing a rhetorical theory of narrative, and he has presented his most recent results in Reading the American Novel, 1920–2010 (2014) and Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017).

Peter J. Rabinowitz, Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College, divides his time between narrative theory and music criticism. His works include Before Reading, Authorizing Readers (with Michael W. Smith), and Narrative Theory (with David Herman, James Phelan, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol). He is program annotator for Symphoria and Contributing Editor of Fanfare.

David H. Richter is Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he has taught eighteenth‐century studies and literary theory since 1970. Richter’s publications include Fable’s End (on closure in didactic novels) and The Progress of Romance (on the problematic of literary history), along with influential theory textbooks The Critical Tradition and Falling into Theory. His most recent book is Reading the Eighteenth‐Century Novel (2017). Richter also publishes on movies, crime fiction, and biblical narrative, and is planning a monograph on the re‐presentation of paintings in narrative cinema.

Ron Scapp is the founding director of the Graduate Program of Urban and Multicultural Education at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx where he is professor of humanities and teacher education. He is the immediate past‐President of the National Association for Ethnic Studies (2011–15), and is the editor of the journal Ethnic Studies Review. He is also a member of the International Committee for Kappa Delta Pi. He has been a long‐time fellow at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has written and edited numerous books and articles on a variety of topics—from popular culture to education, from social and political philosophy to art criticism. He was a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University (2014–15). His most recent book is Reclaiming Education: Moving Beyond the Culture of Reform (2016).

Alan D. Schrift is F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy at Grinnell College (USA). In addition to over eighty published articles or book chapters on Nietzsche and French and German twentieth‐century philosophy, he is the author of Twentieth‐Century French Philosophy (2006), Nietzsche’s French Legacy (1995), and Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (1990). He has also edited seventeen books, including the eight‐volume History of Continental Philosophy (2010), The Logic of the Gift (1997), and most recently Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings of Jean Wahl (2016). He continues as General Editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the Stanford University Press translation of Nietzsche’s Kritische Studienausgabe.

Paul Smith teaches in the Cultural Studies PhD program at George Mason University, and is President of the Cultural Studies Association (2016–18). He is the author of Discerning the Subject (1988), Millennial Dreams: Culture and Capital in the North (1997), and Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy (2007). Smith has also edited Men in Feminism (1987, with Alice Jardine), Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture (1996), and The Renewal of Cultural Studies (2011). He is currently working on a book about deglobalization.

G. Gabrielle Starr is Professor of English and President of Pomona College. She is author of two books, Lyric Generations (2004) and Feeling Beauty (2013). Her most recent work has focused on aesthetics, integrating humanist forms of critique with experimentation in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience. She has been the recipient of a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015.

Michael Toolan is Professor of English Language in the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics in the University of Birmingham, UK. Since 2002 he has been editor of the Journal of Literary Semantics, and for 2016–18 is chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association. He has published many books and articles on literary stylistics, narrative, and linguistics, and narratives, including The Stylistics of Fiction (1988), Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language (1996), Language in Literature (1998), and Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (2nd edn, 2001). His most recent book is Making Sense with Narrative Text: Situation, Repetition, and Picturing in the Reading of Short Stories (2016).

Thomas Carl Wall is currently Chair of the English Department at Taipei Tech in Taiwan where he teaches a variety of literature, history, and cinema courses. He has published on Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben in his Radical Passivity (1999), has contributed a chapter to the volume Politics, Metaphysics, and Death (2005), a chapter to Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, and has published essays on Deleuze’s film books, Harmony Korine’s film Gummo, and other topics. He is currently working on the question of language in Heidegger and Agamben.

Robyn Warhol is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University, where she is Chair of the Department of English and a core faculty member of Project Narrative. She is the creator of victorianserialnovels.org, “Reading Like a Victorian,” a website enabling readers to experience installments of serialized Victorian novels synchronically. Her most recent publications include Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, co‐edited by Susan S. Lanser (Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize in Narrative, 2015) and Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor, co‐authored with Helena Michie (NAVSA Best Book of the Year, 2015). She is also co‐author of Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012) and co‐editor of Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories (2017).

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank all the contributors to this volume, who provided the erudition and wisdom contained in the individual chapters, and who endured with thoughtful patience my editorial queries and suggestions. It has been a pleasure to work with you, and, notwithstanding the name on its spine, this book is really yours.

Too many scholars and friends suggested possible contributors to mention them all, but I do need to single out for thanks Mario DiGangi of the CUNY Graduate Center and James Phelan of Ohio State University, who suggested excellent pinch‐hitters for chapters whose authors dropped out of the project at the very last minute.

It was Deirdre Ilkson of Wiley‐Blackwell who got me interested in doing the Companion, and my prospectus was drafted and re‐drafted with the help of Emma Bennett. Three anonymous reviewers provided comments and suggestions that improved immensely this volume’s organization and scope. Bridget Jennings carried the work forward, and, for the final stages of editing and production, I have been working under the watchful eye of Rebecca Harkin, and her assistant, Emily Corkhill, who have been constantly helpful and supportive. I would also like to thank Doreen Kruger, the copy editor for Blackwell, who not only picked up hundreds of dropped stitches but respected the very different writing styles of three dozen contributors. The attractive object you are holding was created by Manish Luthra and Aneetta Antony, in charge of production for Wiley‐Blackwell.

Most of the chapter editing was done during a fellowship leave granted by my department at Queens College, City University of New York. The index was done on my very own Dell Optiplex, and you don’t want to know. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my wife Golde, who was always there for me, not only my better half but my more social self.

Introduction

David H. Richter

During the 1960s, when I was doing my degrees in English, literary theory was primarily studied as a set of historical topics, in which scholars investigated Aristotle’s notion of mimesis, or Corneille’s doctrine of the Three Unities, or the source of Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime. My own interest in theory as an ongoing as well as a historic concern, in quirky thinkers like Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke, and Walter Benjamin, seemed a harmless oddity to my colleagues in the English Department at Queens College, who warned that I was wasting my time with theory because there was absolutely no future in it. By then, of course, the revolution was well underway that would end by making literary theory the roiling pivot point of my profession. The turbulence and clash of ideas had begun decades before on the Continent, but those of us in the provinces, who read French and German haltingly and Russian not at all, did not experience the explosion of theory until the mid‐1970s, when Russian formalism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and reception theory rode successive waves into our awareness. A profession that had been preoccupied with close and closer readings of canonical texts was now lit up with a rush of ideas, a dozen disparate systems with enormous philosophical reach and scope. Many of those systems were capable also of informing and channeling the social imperatives of women and minorities seeking an ideological manifestation of their desire for greater freedom and power. And even teachers like me, without any social imperative of our own, could become enthralled by the magnificent conversation going on about them.

This was a revolution that was reshaping our sense of intellectual history, forcing us to broaden our horizons and to read deeply, as well as broadly. Anglo‐American feminist thought, like that of Elaine Showalter and Sandra Gilbert, needed to be read against the backdrop of Germaine de Staël, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir, forebears who served either as antagonists or as sources of inspiration. To read Derrida we needed to understand not only the structuralist theories against which he had reacted but philosophers like Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, most of whom were comparative strangers to traditional literary criticism courses. Meanwhile, the New Criticism, which for the most part had generated our close readings, could be seen as a single strand within an international formalism that also included disparate theorists like Victor Shklovsky and R. S. Crane.

Intellectual revolutions too have their Thermidors, and by 1990, it became clear that the Era of Grand Theory was coming to an end. Theory had moved into a period of consolidation, when it was being explored not for its own sake but to make possible a new sort of encounter with a text or a group of related texts. Critical practices that had emerged since the beginning of the revolution, such as gender studies (including queer studies), New Historicism, and, broadest of all, cultural studies, began to dominate the graduate and undergraduate approaches to literature. People began to engage in loose talk about the arrival of a post‐theoretical age, and Terry Eagleton, who had cashed in on the critical revolution with Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), published in 2003 a book titled After Theory.

But theory had by no means disappeared. The new critical discourses that had generated our encounter with texts were so thoroughly imbued with theory that they were essentially incomprehensible in isolation from their theoretical origins. When you read new historical essays on Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt, you couldn’t really understand them properly without unpacking them, and you couldn’t do that without reading the theorists who had influenced him – philosophers of history like Hayden White and Michel Foucault and cultural anthropologists like Clifford Geertz. And to do things properly you would also have to read the theorists who had most influenced them: not only Clifford Geertz on the semiotics of culture, but also Max Weber and Emile Durkheim and Claude Lévi‐Strauss; not only Hayden White on the tropics of history, but also Jacques Derrida and Ludwig Wittgenstein; not only Michel Foucault on the genealogies of power/knowledge, but also Martin Heidegger and the later Nietzsche. The underlying sources for gender studies and cultural studies would be even more diverse.

The process of consolidating and simplifying the elaborate and difficult Grand Theories into workable critical practices involved creating a pidgin, in much the same way people manage to communicate across language barriers by forming a lingua franca for trade and barter during interludes between hostilities. This critical pidgin was encouraged by the way universities in the United States avoided the creation of “schools” of like‐minded thinkers such as those we find on the Continent, and instead filled slots so as to create the greatest possible diversity. The tendency to isolate individuals using a particular theoretical vocabulary from one another had the consequence that, while they could speak their chosen critical language in all its purity at conferences, they had to use some other sort of discourse to talk with their colleagues. The result was a carnival of jostling jargons, in which purity of rhetoric took second place to the pragmatics of discourse. The discourse of one important postcolonial theorist, Gayatri Spivak, was an intricately modulated combination of deconstruction, Marxism, and feminism. And a gender theorist like Judith Butler could derive her notions about sex and society from Foucault, though her rhetorical moves were taken from Derrida and J. L. Austin, and never mind that these thinkers might otherwise be strange bedfellows.

From the 1990s up to the present day, these syncretic trends have continued to proliferate, as the study of literature has become just one area in a widening arena of textual criticism. The critical tools that we had developed for studying literature are being applied to other artistic and cultural productions like film and television, radio plays and comic books, painting and photography—and of course the influence flowed in both directions. The analytic approaches to narrative originally used to study novels and short stories have found application to memoirs and biographies, to medical case histories, and to the narratives judges create in writing legal decisions. Historical movements in architecture and home furnishing, such as the eighteenth‐century vogue in England and France for chinoiserie—once considered capricious episodes of fashion—are now seen as part of a larger cultural plenum shared with other fine and useful arts, determined by changes in trading relationships and other economic and social trends. Cultural studies has, in effect, turned back upon itself in ecocriticism, which attempts to understand how Culture comes to define its opposite, Nature, and to explore the changing relationship between civilization and the wild. Science studies, legal studies, business studies: newly developed fields like these attempt to interrogate the paradigms of knowledge taught to and accepted by professionals in these areas. Most eclectic of all, perhaps, is the field of globalization studies, which uses every resource of the social sciences and humanities to analyze how the international forces of military power, finance, and consumer culture have shaped a planet that had begun to become one world when the European voyages of discovery began over five hundred years ago. The result of all this syncretism has been that, although institutional structures within academe have remained more or less stable—most professors still teach and most students still earn degrees within departments—my own research projects and those of most of my doctoral students, colleagues, and friends have become ever more interdisciplinary.

One other clear change since the turn of the century has been the slow disappearance of the traditional literary canon as a basis for the humanities curriculum. The persistent attacks on the traditional canon as a gentlemen’s club for dead white European males provoked culture wars that began in the 1980s, but those wars are long over now. Ongoing research on the history of literary evaluation revealed that, apart from the general agreement on the significance of Homer and the Bible, the canon of the vernacular literatures had always been in flux. Since it was a presentist illusion that there actually existed a permanent list of what Matthew Arnold had called “the best that has been known and thought in the world,” the job of the humanities would need to be redefined. What we have actually been doing, if we are honest about it, is teaching the most interesting ways of reading the texts that have the greatest cultural importance today. The emphasis on the contemporary and the postmodern did not mean eliminating all the old favorites—indeed, Shakespeare and Jane Austen probably have as many followers as they ever had, and many more than they ever had in their lifetimes. But the culture of the university had approved so many new writers, and so many new areas of study, that it became clear that undergraduate and graduate students could never study any more than a small selection of them, and it would be irrational to feel guilty about what got left out. Nevertheless, living as they do in a postmodern culture that insistently recycles the cultural icons of the past, our students needed to read Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe not merely for its historical importance in the development of the European novel, but in order to understand John Coetzee’s Foe and Michel Tournier’s Vendredi, or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in order to understand Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.

With contemporary cultural value taking clear precedence over other versions of merit, the curriculum began to give greater attention to ethnic literatures, particularly by writers of African American, Asian, and Latino/Hispanic descent, and the contemporary anglophone literature of Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, where so much of the most innovative poetry and fiction since the 1980s has been written. With this shift, postcolonial theory has become a major growth area. Originating in the politics of nation‐states carved out of former European empires, postcolonial theory can equally be applied to American literature: because even without an overseas empire the United States was formed by a process of internal colonization, absorbing into itself territories inhabited by indigenous populations. The theory behind contemporary and historical ethnic studies has tended to borrow and adapt from postcolonial theory and its sources. And, of course, such a program cannot be limited to the contemporary: it can be read back onto the past. It can be applied even to biblical texts, where Israelites appear first as enslaved immigrants, then as the conquering hegemons of Canaan, and finally as a conquered people at risk of cultural absorption by the Eastern empires of Babylon and Persia.

Having spoken of this period as an era of consolidation in the realm of theory, I would have to add, by way of correction, that this has also been an age of proliferation, during which theory has divided in order to multiply. Queer studies, which emerged in the early 1990s, with the work of Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick, was stimulated by the rise of feminist women’s studies but also in partial opposition to it, and is now most usually referred to as LGBTQ (lesbian‐gay‐bisexual‐transgender‐queer). This acronym recognizes the fact that sexual attraction and behavior have many variations, historically and at present, and that the chromosomes one is born with do not determine one’s preferred partner, one’s sexual behavior, or even one’s gender. Further — not to leave out the men, gender studies has come to include historical and sociological studies of maleness and masculinity.

Similar proliferation has developed in the areas of race and ethnicity. Africana studies, which can trace its history back to the late nineteenth century, and which was given a strong theoretical basis by Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, among many others, in the 1980s, has given rise both to a general area of theory, usually called Critical Race Theory, and to numberless specific “studies” programs to analyze the literature and culture of other racial and ethnic groups that have been marginalized in various Western societies. And just as feminism ultimately spawned “masculinity studies,” the ethnic and racial minority studies programs have generated “Whiteness Studies” in a spirit of critique, analyzing the defensive response of a powerful majority group that already sees itself under the threat of becoming, at some future moment, a marginalized minority.

These forms of identity politics have extended to the disabled, a set of disparate groups we will all join some day, if we are lucky, and to the traumatized, whose experience is less of having a specific identity than of losing its stability. Identity, in sum, has become a multidimensional vector space—of race, gender identity, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and dis/ability—through which our imaginary individualities are determined. “Intersectionality” was the term Kimberlé Crenshaw coined in 1989 when she argued that certain combinations of vectors were more deeply discriminated against than others—as when Barbara Smith complained in “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (1977) that as a woman, a lesbian, and an African American, she had been triply marginalized. Ultimately, a coherent intersectionality theory will need to be developed to make better sense of our multiply determined selves.

If “intersectionality” is one overarching concept that helps us explain some recent developments in literary studies, another is “consilience.” Coined originally by the Victorian polymath William Whewell, “consilience” was used by biologist E. O. Wilson as the title of his 1998 book, which speculated that the sciences and the humanities would ultimately converge in their explanations of social and cultural phenomena. Whether or not such a genuine convergence fully occurs, several quite recent developments in literary theory are clearly inflected by the hard sciences of biology, physics, and chemistry and not merely by sociology, politics, and economics.

Evolutionary literary criticism explores the hypothesis that creating and consuming literature is not simply a delightful pastime but part of the reason the old world apes that became Homo sapiens succeeded and became dominant as a species. Telling stories was how our hominid ancestors communicated and bonded with each other as cooperative hunting and gathering societies living in competitive tribal groups, where the forces of both natural selection and sexual selection favored those who did it well and wiped out those who failed. It is clear that we are still telling stories, and evolutionary literary theorists would argue that narratives continue to have the same function: they enhance our abilities to survive by guiding the decisions we make about the work we do for a living, the friends we trust, and the prospective mates we select. Pride and Prejudice is a masterpiece of wit and irony, but it is also a primer on the danger to nubile women of succumbing to the attractions of superficially attractive young men, and of the rewards of seeking a mate whose solid worth may be obscured by defensive shyness—and this may be one reason so many subsequent romance novels have taken the bare bones of its plot as their model.

If evolutionary theory appears oriented toward the distant past, posthumanist literary theory is oriented toward the future, as our minds merge with the machine‐minds that we have learned to create to assist our own. The cyborg—abbreviation for cybernetic organism—appeared originally in science fiction, but the merger has already occurred; we are already posthuman. We find ourselves helplessly dependent on the tablets and smartphones we carry about with us, but at the same time we are practically omniscient, with vast libraries of information available with a few clicks on a keyboard or taps on a touch screen. Household robots remain a theme of science fiction, but many of us own an invisible digital servant: asked nicely, the disembodied Siri or Alexa will dial our friends, call us a taxi, turn on the lights or other appliances in our home, give us our precise global position in relation to the street grid, or tell us about the coming weather. Virtual reality technology allows us to “be” places we are not, with a 360° view of our surroundings in stereophonic sound. Posthumanist theory investigates the psychology and the politics of our immersion in the collective world of the internet, and its consequences for the social structures of our world.

Meanwhile, cognitive psychology seeks a new center within, exploring the functions and activities of the human brain and mind. It probably got its start when Noam Chomsky conjectured that natural languages are too similar in their deep structures to be the random product of culture, and are learned too quickly to be entirely the behaviorist result of the verbal stimuli children receive. Chomsky argued that human children are born with a “Language Acquisition Device” hard‐wired into their brains. While this theory is still contested, the controversy sparked widespread investigations into the relationship of mind and brain, by which it became clear that, whether the tracks are hard‐wired from birth or laid down by experience, the brain processes language in very specific sites. Neurologists examining patients with aphasias caused by brain lesions had long ago discovered that we store people’s names in a different site from common nouns, and that certain lesions prevented people from understanding metaphor and others metonymy. Through advances in neural science, cognitive theory has enabled us, without creating brain lesions in healthy subjects, to correlate specific thought processes with activity in specific areas of the brain by mapping which sites demand greater blood flow or demonstrate greater electrical conductivity. Since we store short‐term memories in different places from long‐term memories, it is suspected that the vivid dreams we experience while unconscious may be, contrary to what Freud thought, an artifact of the process of sorting and then “dumping” the data of the previous day. Philology could reveal the poem and its patterns, and rhetoric could give us some inkling of how audiences reacted, but until recently the key aesthetic moment of reader response was a mystery, a “black box” whose workings were hidden to us. Experimental cognitive psychology, however, has begun to shine light on both mind and brain, explaining how literary tropes (such as metaphor) are involved in all cognition, how empathy with fictional characters occurs, and how literary texts both engage and occasionally test the limits of cognitive functioning.

Digital humanities, finally, describes a wildly diverse group of projects that depend on the digital representation of texts and other data, and their distribution through the internet. Students of literature routinely consume the product of text digitization when they access both primary texts and criticism published in learned journals via the internet links provided by their university libraries. Digital images of rare or unique books make it possible for us to examine the manuscript of Beowulf while sitting at our desk; to view and read the printed versions of Shakespeare quartos; to compare the individually water‐colored copies of William Blake’s poems and prophetic books; and to view the poems and paintings on which Dante Gabriel Rossetti was simultaneously working.

Going beyond mere access, digital analysis of linguistic features has been used to test the ascription of texts published anonymously or under pseudonyms, like the Spectator essays and the Letters of Junius; scholars have also concluded that the first of the three narrative digressions in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews was probably written by his sister Sarah. A project at the University of Nebraska analyzes Jane Austen’s use of free indirect discourse, with an eye towards specifying the linguistic features that mark its presence.

The availability of large corpora of texts from earlier centuries has theoretical implications that have been explored by scholars like Franco Moretti, who has advocated a “distant reading” to discover features and trends in a literature that by the eighteenth century had become far too massive for any single scholar to read more than a small fraction. Other critics like Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best have argued for a “surface reading” of texts to recover obvious features that have been temporarily obscured by psychoanalytical or Marxian searches for deeper meanings or latent content. All these manifestations of theory have taken us far beyond the search for close and closer readings that obsessed literary criticism in the 1950s.

The Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory has gathered together three dozen original essays, all by noted scholars in their fields, designed to introduce the general reader to the latest ideas about the literary and cultural theory of the last half century, focusing on the ideas that are still alive today. We have grouped the chapters for the reader’s convenience into seven sections, but many of the chapters speak to more than a single aspect of theory. The chapter on Digital Humanities, for example, has been placed with the other essays on “The Task of Reading,” but it might equally have been situated with “Scientific Inflections.” Scholars who were writing about theoretical movements whose heyday lay primarily in the past, like the chapters on the New Critics and the Chicago Formalists, were asked to discuss what was dead and what was still living about their group of theorists. Those who were writing about fields that were new or emergent were asked to trace the pre‐history as well as the current flowering of their area. Our aim was to allot proper space to all the areas of theory most relevant today, arranged by topic rather than chronology, in order to highlight the relationships between the earlier and the most recent theoretical projects.

Part ILiterary Form: Narrative and Poetry

1British and American New Criticism

William E. Cain

For much of the twentieth century, the New Criticism was the dominant method of textual interpretation. Most critics and teachers of literature in college and universities, both in Great Britain and the United States, were committed to “close reading”—the intensive study of the words on the page, the careful examination of the poem in itself, which was the theory and practice that the New Criticism described and promoted. The New Critics were different in important respects from one another, but, as one of their leaders, Cleanth Brooks, observed: “The one common element that I can discern among those loosely grouped together as New Critics was the special concern they exhibited for the rhetorical structure of the literary text” (Brooks 1984: 42).

Few today would claim to be or would aspire to become a New Critic. The movement expired, it is generally agreed, decades ago. Yet when it arose and established itself, the New Criticism was viewed not only as significantly “new” but also as superior to everything that had preceded it. In the mid‐1950s, Hyatt H. Waggoner identified the New Criticism as “the best criticism we have or are likely to have for a long time. Certainly, it is the chief reason why it is perfectly correct to characterize our age as, whatever its other failings, a brilliant age for criticism.” In Waggoner’s judgment, “the greatest contribution” that the New Criticism had made was “its creation and demonstration of a way of talking about literature at once objective and literary … There are no extrinsic or irrelevant standards applied, there is no subjectivism, and there is no mystique. We can look at what is being pointed at and agree or disagree with the interpretation” (Waggoner 1957: 224). The poet‐critic William Logan has referred to this text‐focused era of the New Criticism from the 1920s to the 1960s as “the golden age of modern literary criticism” (Logan 2008: 255).

We can connect the rise and institutionalization of the New Criticism and its emphasis on the close reading of literary texts to a series of major works of literary criticism:

T. S. Eliot,

The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism

(1920);

Selected Essays, 1917–1932

(1932)

I. A. Richards,

Principles of Literary Criticism

(1924);

Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment

(1929)

William Empson,

Seven Types of Ambiguity

(1930)