Links with info about lit critters

ColoradoGuy

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I think it's helpful to have a sticky with links people think are particularly helpful for understanding some of the assorted lit critters and movements we're discussing. I'll start with these. Please chime in with others.
  1. Paul de Man. His reputation suffered when some anti-semitic things he wrote during WWII came to light after his death, but he's still one of the biggies.
  2. Jacques Derrida. The godfather of deconstruction. Major post-structuralist
  3. Jacques Lacan. The guy who made Freud legit again.
  4. Stanley Fish. The big name in reader-response theory.
  5. Michel Foucault. Particularly known for his examinations of prisons, madness, and sexuality. Major post-structuralist
  6. Ferdinand de Saussure. Often said to be the father of modern linguistic studies and semiotics (the study of signs).
  7. Claude Levi-Strauss. Actually an anthropologist, his structuralist analysis became popular with critters.
  8. Roland Barthes . Major structuralist.
  9. New Criticism. A point of view emphasizing the text in isolation.
  10. New Historicism. The inevitable reaction to New Criticism.







 

Higgins

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Some additions

I think it's helpful to have a sticky with links people think are particularly helpful for understanding some of the assorted lit critters and movements we're discussing. I'll start with these. Please chime in with others.



Oh dear....New Criticism? New Historicism? Those are just going to be painful. (As are Stanley Fish and Paul de Man).

How about...

Mary Douglas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Douglas

G. Spivak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayatri_Chakravorty_Spivak

Julia Kristeva: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva

Elinor S. Shaffer http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=635707567&searchurl=isbn=0521298075 ....she seems to be working more on science and literature these days. Anyway...very brilliant and not much of a POMO or structuralist....just brilliant.
 
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Higgins

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Why what happens with Wikkilinks?

To you, perhaps. I'd beware of too many Wiki links, by the way.

What is the problem with Wiki links? I only use ones that I've looked at to make sure they are not insane.

I wish I could have found a Wiki-style link for Elinor S. Saffer....
 
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I'm all for explication de texte, and am perfectly willing to duel over it . . . and yeah, New Criticism, taken to the extreme, is just as daft as any other technique taken to the extreme.

And if you've not read de Man in French, you haven't read him.
 

Higgins

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And I was so sure

I'm all for explication de texte, and am perfectly willing to duel over it . . . and yeah, New Criticism, taken to the extreme, is just as daft as any other technique taken to the extreme.

And if you've not read de Man in French, you haven't read him.


Come on! Ya gotta go ape over the New Criticism! It has only been dead and gone for the last 60 years....but it is exactly what everybody gets taught in creative writing classes, but only through some indirect source, apparently, or so I would guess.

Hmmm...nice about Paul de Man. I didn't want to read him anyway and now I haven't.
 

Certain_Entropy

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You should add Slavoj Zizek. He's a neo Lacanian and writes about everything theses day, from psychoanalyzing The Usual Suspects to framing the US in ideological coordinates of capitialism.
 

GOTHOS

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I still like Frye, although I understand he's quite unfashionable now.

My impression is that Frye came at the crux of a "literature as myth" meme that got started in the early part of the century, but that after that Marxist and Freudian hermeneutics became entrenched as the only way to properly critique art/literature.

Frederic Jameson, who unlike many Marxists might have the intelligence to properly critique Frye, botched the job in his POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS. It's easier to ignore Frye than to refute him these days.