Literary Theory: An Anthology

Rating:
Summary: Good Anthology
Review: (Complaints about "jargon" are simply reactions against theory.) I find this book very useful and teach it to undergrads annually.

Rating:
Summary: Good Anthology
Review: (Complaints about "jargon" are simply reactions against theory.) I find this book very useful and teach it to undergrads annually.

Rating:
Summary: Blackwell Publishers
Review: Literary Theory: An Anthology is a unique combination of the classic statements in criticism and the new theories that have revolutionized literary study in the past several decades. This unprecedented collection will be an invaluable reference tool for students interested in acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the most recent developments in critical theory while becoming expert in the tradition from which the new theories derive. The anthology contains classic texts from Formalism, Structuralism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Historicism, and Feminism, and it includes cutting-edge work by leading theoreticians in such fields as Post-Modernism, Cultural Studies, Post-Colonial Criticism, Gay/Lesbian Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Film. The anthology constitutes the most comprehensive collection of the schools and methods that make up the rich and exciting field of literary and cultural studies. Contents : Part I: Formalisms: Russian Formalism. a. Introduction: Jefferson, "Russian Formalism". b. Shlovsky, "Art as Technique". c. Tomachevsky, "Thematics". d. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. e. Bakhtin, "Discourse and the Novel". f. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. The New Critisicm. g. Introduction: Robey, "Anglo-American New Criticism". h. Brooks, "Formalist Critics". i. Brooks, "The Language of Paradox". j. Appendix: Donne, "The Canonization". Part II: Structuralism and Linguistics: a. Introduction: Culler, "The Linguistic Foundation". b. Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure. c. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. d. Jakobson, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles". e. Austin, How To Do Things With Words. f. Levi-Strauss, "Structural Analysis of Myth". Part III: Psychoanalysis: a. Introduction: "Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis". b. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. c. Freud, "On Narcissism". d. Freud, "The Uncanny". e. Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle". f. Freud "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego". g. Mahler, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. h. Lacan, "The Mirror Stage". i. Lacan, "The Symbolic Order". j. Lacan, "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious". k. Girard, "Triangular Desire". l. Blatt & Schichman, "Two Primary Configurations of Psychopathology". Part IV: Marxism: a. Introduction: "Starting From Zero: Basic Marxism". b. Hegel, "Dialectics". c. Marx, Grundrisse. d. Marx, The German Ideology. e. Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party. f. Marx, "Wage Labor". g. Marx, Capital. h. Gramsci, "Hegemony". i. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. j. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". k. Lukacs, The Historical Novel. l. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses". m. Fiske,"Culture, Ideology, Interpellation". n. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology. o. Kotulak, "White guys happiest, study finds". p. Dobnik, "Nike told of worker abuses in Vietnam factories". Part V: Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, Post-Modernism: a. Introduction: "The Class of 1968--Post-Structuralism par lui-meme". b. Nietzsche, The Will to Power. c. Heidegger, Being and Time. d. Heidegger, Identity and Difference. e. Bataille, "Heterology". f. Foucault, The Order of Things. g. Derrida, "Differance". h. Baudrillard, The System of Objects. i. Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy". j. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language. k. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. l. Baudrillard, "The Order of Simulacra". jm. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. n. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Part VI: Feminism: a. Introduction: "Feminist Paradigms". b. Rubin, "The Traffic in Women". c. Fetterley, "On the Politics of Literature". d. Irigaray, "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine". e. Irigaray, "Commodities Amongst Themselves". f. Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". h. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. i. Joplin, "The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours". j. Lorde, "Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference". m. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book". Part VII: Gender Studies, Gay/Lesbian Studies, Queer Theory: a. Introduction: "Contingencies of Gender". b. Rubin, "Sexual Transformations". c. Hocquenghom, Homosexual Desire. d. Foucault, History of Sexuality. e. De Lauretis, "The Technology of Gender". f. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. g. Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination". h. Edelman, "Homographesis". i. Moon, "A Small Boy and Others". j. Halberstam, "F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity". k. Chodorow, "Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation". Part VIII: Historicisms: a. Introduction: Montrose, "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture". b. Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets". c. Sinfield, "Cultural Materialism, Othello, and the Politics of Plausability". d. Sundquist, "Melville, Delany, and New World Slavery". Part IX: Ethnic Studies, Post-Coloniality, International Studies: a. Introduction: Davies, "Migratory Subjectivities". b. Brantlinger, The Reign of Darkness. c. DuBois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings". d. Said, Orientalism. e. Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera. f. Gates, "The Blackness of Blackness". g. Morrison, Playing in the Dark. h. Bhabha, Locations of Culture. i. Appiah, In My Father's House. j. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity. k. Gilroy, Black Atlantic. l. Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island. m. Kincaid, A Small Place. Part X: Cultural Studies: a. Introduction: The Politics of Culture. b. Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry". c. Radway, Reading the Romance. d. Hall, "The Rediscovery of 'Ideology'". e. Bourdieu, Distinction. f. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. g. McLaren, "Punk and History". h. Ewen, Self-Consuming Images. i. Fiske, Television Culture. j. Bordo, "Material Girl".

Rating:
Summary: A further recommendation
Review: The strengths and weaknesses of this anthology have been thorougly hashed out by other reviewers, (particularly alopez02 & onela22) & my view of the text falls somewhere in between their 2 opinions. BUT, I would recommend _The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism_ (5 stars) over Rivkin/Ryan if you have to choose only 1 anthology: pound for pound--& I mean this literally, they both weigh in on the heavy end of the scale ;>) --you'll get more bang for your buck with the Norton's (though I own both and find it handy to use them in conjunction, 1 tome often contains different selections than the other). The Norton's contains a far more comprehensive survey extending from the classics (Plato, Horace, Aristotle, et al) to the latest postmodern theorists (Derrida, Kristeva, etc.) & hence gives a good overview not only of the individual theories themselves, but also of the development of Western critical theory.

The difficulty with any anthology, & particularly an anthology of lit crit, is there's simply too much material out there to cover in depth in 1 tome. So keep this in mind & remember that the anthology's a jumping off point for further literary study (Norton's has excellent exhaustive bibliographies on each writer included). Use it to find scholars whose theories intrigue you and then go to the source of the material to get their theories whole cloth.

Best of luck!

Rating:
Summary: A further recommendation
Review: The strengths and weaknesses of this anthology have been thorougly hashed out by other reviewers, (particularly alopez02 & onela22) & my view of the text falls somewhere in between their 2 opinions. BUT, I would recommend _The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism_ (5 stars) over Rivkin/Ryan if you have to choose only 1 anthology: pound for pound--& I mean this literally, they both weigh in on the heavy end of the scale ;>) --you'll get more bang for your buck with the Norton's (though I own both and find it handy to use them in conjunction, 1 tome often contains different selections than the other). The Norton's contains a far more comprehensive survey extending from the classics (Plato, Horace, Aristotle, et al) to the latest postmodern theorists (Derrida, Kristeva, etc.) & hence gives a good overview not only of the individual theories themselves, but also of the development of Western critical theory.

The difficulty with any anthology, & particularly an anthology of lit crit, is there's simply too much material out there to cover in depth in 1 tome. So keep this in mind & remember that the anthology's a jumping off point for further literary study (Norton's has excellent exhaustive bibliographies on each writer included). Use it to find scholars whose theories intrigue you and then go to the source of the material to get their theories whole cloth.

Best of luck!

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Anthology
Review: This book was used in my graduate level current literary theory course. It is a wonderful text that supplies ready access to the writers and texts that helped to shape what theory is today. It is not the intention of this book to necessarily apply these theories and show how they can be used. Often, the texts included seem to have no bearing on literature. That is simply because they were not all written as literary theory texts when they were penned. Instead, theory absorbed them and changed itself based upon the ideas in the text. This book is an anthology, not a guide. For a book that shows how to use theory, I recommend Lois Tyson's Critical Theory Today. For a book that shows the texts that each theory is based upon, buy this one.

Rating:
Summary: Ambitious attempt at critical diversity, but overly complex.
Review: This is a nice attempt to convey in an anthology past and current literary theory. Especially positive about the text, is that it interweaves critical pieces by established theorists with a prior in-depth discussion of the pieces by the book's authors. The intention is to make the pieces more accessible to the reader. The reader is also given a great sense of immediacy by access to the theorists' own work, and not only a discussion of it. The book is also good on supplying a strong bibilography to go with the theorists' works. But there are problems with the book which ultimately put into question whether it fulfills its objective to present clearly to the student literary theory. And as a college student of literary, I do have reservations about recommending this book. Rather than elucidate the theories, the editors are unfortunately undermined by their over reliance on jargon and their overly complex writing. The authors claim to discuss several theoretical models useful to the students and classroom, and the reader no doubt feels more knowledgeable about the many theoretical models out there. But what I think is important to gain from this book, is not only a knowledge of the theories, but also how the theories fundamentally operate and how they can be applied to a text. To this extent, the book falls short of its intention.

The book does not present theory in an accessible manner to students. Comprised of unnecessary jargon and overly complex and confusing writing, the two editors' discussions of the theories are too broad, and often muddled in obscurity. Too often, the editors do not define complex terms in their analysis, or often continually define a term without defining its related terms and how the terms are related to each other. Without a good stylistic architecture, it is then difficult to follow the editors' explication of the theory.

This problem of clarity also plagues the excerpted theoretical works themselves, whose arguments are hard to follow without further supplemental material by either the editors or the theorists. This problem of a lack of supplemental materials foregrounds a larger problem with the book's composition, namely that it is an anthology.

As the editors attempt to present the work as an anthology there is a tendency to incorporate - pieces - of works rather than whole works. The belief is that the reader will not be bogged down with tertiary works, but only those which most clearly address the present theory. But, as was the case with this book, as the literary pieces (often, those other from the theorists), were introjected into the chapters without proper context and without a reason why they - specifically - should be there, the literary pieces (often, overly short at around 2-3 pages), confused rather than explicated the overall theory, i.e., Feminism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis. I was not even sure what I was supposed to gain from an accompanying piece.

The piece-meal organization of the book, while useful in supplying critical pieces to along with the theorists' works, is finally unbalanced. While some of the excerpted pieces do contribute to a greater understanding of a general theory, a majority of the pieces do not contribute to a better understanding of a theory and complicate such an understanding.

Overall, the anthology composition of the book is counter-productive, and the author's over emphasis on jargon only makes it more difficult not easier, to appreciate and understand the theories. And that several of the excerpted theoretical pieces lack clarity and are overly filled with jargon, reduces the enjoyment of the book.

Rating:
Summary: one of the best anthologies available
Review: This is one of the two best anthologies of literary theory available (the other is the fourth edition of RC DAvis and R. Schleiffer, Literary Criticism (Longmans).. Rivkin and Ryan's have a comprehensivce and judicious set of selections, covering all the key areas of contemporary theory, and provide useful introductoiry material.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Anthology
Review: With all apologies to Alan Lopez, I have never seen a better anthology of literary theory. I am a college faculty member, one who teachers primarily first-year students (what used to be called freshmen :-)). I use literary theory in both literature and writing classes, and there is just no other book with the range of selections in this one, and no other book with such sensible, helpful introductions. Certainly there is jargon, in both the selections and in the introductions, but to simplify the texts any more would be to replace reading them with reading "Foucault for Beginners." "Foucault for Beginners" is a fun book, and even useful, but it is not an anthology of primary theory texts. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough to people who want to have selections of a workable length (neither too long to swamp you, nor too short to be unrepresentative of the original authors' projects). If you are thinking about buying this book, that means you are interested in theory. If you are interested in theory, buy this book. If you teach theory, order this book. My only hesitation about requiring this for undergraduates is the price, which is a little hefty unless you are going to be sure to use a decent size chunk of the text.

Rating:
Summary: Almost incomparably superior to other anthologies
Review: With all apologies to Alan Lopez, I have never seen a better anthology of literary theory. I am a college faculty member, one who teachers primarily first-year students (what used to be called freshmen :-)). I use literary theory in both literature and writing classes, and there is just no other book with the range of selections in this one, and no other book with such sensible, helpful introductions. Certainly there is jargon, in both the selections and in the introductions, but to simplify the texts any more would be to replace reading them with reading "Foucault for Beginners." "Foucault for Beginners" is a fun book, and even useful, but it is not an anthology of primary theory texts. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough to people who want to have selections of a workable length (neither too long to swamp you, nor too short to be unrepresentative of the original authors' projects). If you are thinking about buying this book, that means you are interested in theory. If you are interested in theory, buy this book. If you teach theory, order this book. My only hesitation about requiring this for undergraduates is the price, which is a little hefty unless you are going to be sure to use a decent size chunk of the text.