The recent enthusiasm for things postmodern has often produced a caricature of Modernism as monolithic and reactionary. Peter Nicholls argues instead that the distinctive feature of Modernism is its diversity. Through a lively analysis of each of Modernism's main literary movements, he explores the connections between the new stylistic developments and the shifting politics of gender and authority.Nicholls introduces a wealth of literary experimentation, beginning with Baudelaire and Mallarm and moving forward to the first avant-gardes. Close readings of key texts monitor the explosive histor... View More...
What motivates us to reread literary works? How is our pleasure, interpretation, involvement and evaluation different when we read a literary work and when we reread it? This book focuses on the implications of rereading for critical understanding. Drawing on literary theory, cultural anthropology, psychiatry, philosophy and previous theories of reading, Calinescu describes the dynamics of rereading and explores the sometimes complementary, sometimes sharply conflicting relationships between reading and rereading. View More...
Contemporary literary theory takes truth and meaning to be dependent on shared conventions in a community of discourse and views authors' intentions as irrelevant to interpretation. This view, argues Reed Way Dasenbrock, owes much to Anglo-American analytic philosophy as developed in the 1950s and 1960s by such thinkers as Austin and Kuhn, but it ignores more recent work by philosophers like Davidson and Putnam, who have mounted a counterattack on this earlier conventionalism. This book draws on current analytic philosophy to resuscitate the notion of objective truth and intentionalist models ... View More...
In What's Wrong with Postmodernism Norris critiques the "postmodern-pragmatist malaise" of Baudrillard, Fish, Rorty, and Lyotard. In contrast he finds a continuing critical impulse--an "enlightened or emancipatory interest"--in thinkers like Derrida, de Man, Bhaskar, and Habermas. Offering a provocative reassessment of Derrida's influence on modern thinking, Norris attempts to sever the tie between deconstruction and American literary critics who, he argues, favor endless, playful, polysemic interpretation at the expense of systematic argument. As he explores leftist attempts to arrive at an a... View More...
