Uses of Literature

Author: Rita Felski
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444359630
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
Uses of Literature bridges the gap between literary theory and common-sense beliefs about why we read literature. Explores the diverse motives and mysteries of why we read Offers four different ways of thinking about why we read literature - for recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock Argues for a new “phenomenology” in literary studies that incorporates the historical and social dimensions of reading Includes examples of literature from a wide range of national literary traditions

The Uses of Literature

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156932509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
In these widely praised essays, Calvino reflects on literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world. Calvino himself made the selection of pieces to be included in this volume. Translated by Patrick Creagh. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

The Uses of Literature

Author: Perry Link
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Book Description
Why do people in socialist China read and write literary works? Earlier studies in Western Sinology have approached Chinese texts from the socialist era as portraits of society, as keys to the tug-of-war of dissent, or, more recently, as pursuit of "pure art." The Uses of Literature looks broadly and empirically at these and many other "uses" of literature from the points of view of authors, editors, political authorities, and several kinds of readers. Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing, considers texts ranging from elite "misty" poetry to underground hand-copied volumes (shouchauben) and shows in concrete detail how people who were involved with literature sought to teach, learn, enjoy, explore, debate, lead, control, and resist. Using the late 1970s and early 1980s as an entree to the workings of China's "socialist literary system," the author shows how that system held sway from 1950 until around 1990, when an encroaching market economy gradually but fundamentally changed it. In addition to providing a definitive overview of how the socialist Chinese literary system worked, Link offers comparisons to the similar system in the Soviet Union. In the final chapter, the book seeks to explain how the word "good" was used and understood when applied to literary works in such systems. Combining aspects of cultural and literary studies, The Uses of Literature will reward anyone interested in the literature of modern China or how creativity is affected by a "socialist literary system."

The Use and Abuse of Literature

Author: Marjorie Garber
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307277127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
In this deep and engaging meditation on the usefulness and uselessness of reading in the digital age, Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber aims to reclaim “literature” from the periphery of our personal, educational, and professional lives and restore it to the center, as a radical way of thinking. But what is literature anyway, how has it been understood over time, and what is its relevance for us today? Who gets to decide what the word means? Why has literature been on the defensive since Plato? Does it have any use at all, other than serving as bourgeois or aristocratic accoutrements attesting to one’s worldly sophistication and refinement of spirit? What are the boundaries that separate it from its “commercial” instance and from other more mundane kinds of writing? Is it, as most of us assume, good to read, much less study—and what would that mean?

The Event of Literature

Author: Terry Eagleton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300178816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Offers a thorough examination of the philosophy of literature, looking at the place of literature in human culture, what literature can be defined as and much more.

The Color of Melancholy

Author: Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801853814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
In the 14th century, beset by wars, plague, famine, and social unrest, French writers saw themselves in the winter of literature, a time for retreat into reflection. Yet, in the midst of their troubles, as this extraordinary study reveals, large number of Latin texts were translated into French, opening up new areas of thought and literary exploration. 8 color illustrations.

Why Read the Classics?

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544146379
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
A posthumously published collection of thirty-six essays offering Italo Calvino's invigorating and illuminating analysis of his most treasured literary classics.

Theory of Literature

Author: Rene Wellek
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781628972832
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Theory of Literature was born from the collaboration of Ren Wellek, a Vienna-born student of Prague School linguistics, and Austin Warren, an independently minded "old New Critic." Unlike many other textbooks of its era, however, this classic kowtows to no dogma and toes no party line. Wellek and Warren looked at literature as both a social product--influenced by politics, economics, etc.--as well as a self-contained system of formal structures. Incorporating examples from Aristotle to Coleridge, written in clear, uncondescending prose, Theory of Literature is a work which, especially in its suspicion of simplistic explanations and its distrust of received wisdom, remains extremely relevant to the study of literature today.

The Uses of Literary History

Author: Marshall Brown
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822317142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
In this collection, Marshall Brown has gathered essays by twenty leading literary scholars and critics to appraise the current state of literary history. Representing a range of disciplinary specialties and approaches, these essays illustrate and debate the issues that confront scholars working on the literary past and its relation to the present. Concerned with both the theory and practice of literary history, these provocative and sometimes combative pieces examine the writing of literary history, the nature of our interest in tradition, and the ways that literary works act in history. Among the numerous issues discussed are the uses of evidence, anachronism, the dialectic of texts and contexts, particularism and the resistance to reductive understanding, the construction of identities, memory, and the endurance of the past. New historicism, nationalism, and gender studies appear in relation to more traditional issues such as textual editing, taste, and literary pedagogy. Combining new and old perspectives, The Uses of Literary History provides a broad view of the field. Contributors. Charles Altieri, Jonathan Arac, R. Howard Bloch, Richard Dellamora, Paul H. Fry, Geoffrey Hartman, Denis Hollier, Donna Landry, Lawrence Lipking, Jerome J. McGann, Walter Benn Michaels, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Virgil Nemoianu, Annabel Patterson, David Perkins, Marjorie Perloff, Meredith Anne Skura, Doris Sommer, Peter Stallybrass, Susan Stewart

The Uses of Literature in Modern Japan

Author: Sari Kawana
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350024910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
"The Uses of Literature in Modern Japan explores the varying uses of literature in Japan from the late Meiji period to the present, considering how creators, conveyors, and consumers of literary content have treated texts and their authors as cultural resources to be packaged, promoted, and preserved. As the printed word became a crucial form of entertainment for an increasingly literate public in early 20th-century Japan, the publishing industry developed by leaps and bounds. This study illustrates how the industry exerted forces strong enough to influence the appearance and substance of literary output. Touching upon a wide array of key industry players as well as authors and their works, Kawana takes up previously neglected issues such as the materiality of texts, the role of editors and advertising campaigns, the interplay between literature and other media and the creation and dissemination of larger cultural fantasies tied to literary consumption. She stresses the agency and creativity with which readers engaged literary works, from unintentional misreadings of propaganda literature to innovative adaptations of canonical texts in visual media, culminating in the practice of literary tourism. Moving beyond close reading of texts to look at their historical context - the rise of literacy and social mobility in the Meiji period, the redistribution of leisure time and the growth of unemployment in the Taisho period, and wartime censorship and the subsequent economic boom in the Showa period - the book will appeal not only to scholars and students of modern Japanese literature but also those studying the history of the book and modern Japanese cultural history more broadly" --