Books
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Deconstructive Criticism, published by Columbia University Press in 1983, offers an advanced introduction to first-generation French and American deconstructive critics. It surveys both the history of ideas and the major figures of this contemporary vanguard movement in philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies, addressing key issues posed by the works of such European thinkers as Saussure, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Heidegger, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault as well as the Americans Hayden White, the Yale Critics (de Man, Miller, Hartman, Bloom), and the Boundary 2 Group (Spanos, Riddel, Bové). Terry Eagleton of Oxford University regards this work as a "substantial achievement." It has been used in many college and university classrooms, with 14,000 copies in circulation since its publication. It was co-published in London by Hutchinson and also translated into Korean. |
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Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s (Columbia University
Press, 1988) demonstrates that some of the most noteworthy advances in
American literature during the latter part of the twentieth century
come not in drama, fiction, or poetry, but in literary criticism and
theory. Spanning six decades, thirteen critical schools, and seventy
critics, this full-length cultural history of American criticism covers
social backgrounds, major critics and texts, philosophical roots, and
significant relations among allied and antagonistic movements in the U.
S. and abroad. The book examines contending schools' educational goals,
political allegiances, and university affiliations. Beginning with the
emergence of Marxist criticism in the 1930s, the text explores a whole
array of contending schools and movements: New Criticism, the Chicago
School, the New York Intellectuals, myth criticism, phenomenology and
existential criticism, hermeneutics, reader-response criticism,
literary structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, feminist
criticism, black aesthetics, and cultural studies. Of this book's
panoramic narrative, J. Hillis Miller of the University of California
at Irvine observes, "Leitch's authoritative and even-handed account is
placed against the backdrop of the social, cultural, and political
history of the period." This book was given a Choice Award and named an
Outstanding Academic Book by the Association of College and Research
Libraries. It has been translated into Hungarian, Japanese, and Korean. |
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advent of academic cultural studies in recent times marks a new
development in the two centuries-long history of modern cultural
criticism; it reflects the triumph of popular culture, the growing
pertinence of left critiques of advanced consumer society, and the
fruitful thinking of poststructuralism in both the humanities and
social sciences. Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory,
Poststructuralism, published in 1992 by Columbia University Press,
promotes a cultural studies fully informed by poststructuralism,
especially by this movement's emphasis on cultural differences,
margins, and hybridizations. The book illustrates the shortcomings of
the orthodoxies of the recent past as well as the limitations of many
current critical theories and methods, focusing on seven key topics in
the field: social formation and cultural critique; authorship and
intention; poetic discourse and the social text; literary genre and
cultural conventions; minority literatures and general poetics; textual
interpretation and evaluation; institutional theory and analysis.
Within the context of cultural studies, the book affirms the ethical
and political dimensions of literary criticism, and it proclaims the
necessity of university intellectuals' engagement with cultural issues.
In a review of this text, William Cain of Wellesley College declares
that it "shows an impressive command of a diverse array of theorists,
texts, and ideas, and it moves at a brisk, stimulating pace." |
Postmodernism--Local Effects, Global Flows, published in 1996 by the State University of New York Press, offers a dozen concise case studies of postmodern economics, philosophy, literary criticism, feminism, educational philosophy, poetry, painting, historiography, and cultural studies. It argues that disorganization and disaggregation characterize postmodern times, and that postmodern phenomena resemble imploded geological formations with historical strata in kaleidoscopic disarray: neither economics, nor politics, nor culture escapes this novel form. Among the influential contemporary figures examined are Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, John Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Henry Giroux and Stanley Aronowitz, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, Pentti Saarikoski, and Julian Schnabel. About this book, Gerald Graff of the University of Illinois at Chicago says it "brings welcome illumination to readers who have longed for a readable and reliable guide to the labyrinth of postmodernisms." |
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The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (W. W. Norton, 2001)--Vincent B. Leitch, general editor--offers 2,600 pages of material selected from 148 figures, ranging from Gorgias and Plato to bell hooks and Judith Butler. Each figure receives an informative headnote complete with annotated prose bibliography covering main works, biographies, bibliographies, and secondary sources. Selections are thoroughly annotated. A separate Instructor’s Manual accompanies the volume. The anthology provides an extensive bibliography divided into six sections and designed to be the standard reference source in the field. This work is the most comprehensive, diverse, scholarly, up-to-date, and innovative anthology of critical theory, making special contributions in medieval theory, the history of women’s criticism, contemporary multicultural theory, and theory since the 1970s. Catherine Stimpson of New York University finds "This book is indispensible," and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard University judges "No serious student of literature can do without this anthology." |
Theory Matters (Routledge, 2003) provides a historically framed personal account of theory today, focusing on its role in both literary and cultural studies while illustrating the dynamics of postmodern disorganization in its latest accelerated phase. Chapters examine recent theory hits and fashions, assessing new stages of development in key interdisciplinary areas such as globalization studies, subculture research, and critical fashion studies. Theory Matters also offers an insider’s account of editing a Norton anthology, something no other Norton editor has ever done. John Guillory of New York University observes, "Theory Matters is an authoritative and informed assessment of the current state of theory, which Vincent Leitch describes as ‘disaggregated’ or ‘disorganized,’ a condition not of debility but of responsiveness to the cultural and socioeconomic conditions of contemporary society." |
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Across the globe, the field of literary theory has injected a broad array of innovative concepts into intellectual life--compulsory heterosexuality, cultural capital, hybridity, interpretive communities, and whiteness, to name a few. The manifesto Living with Theory (Blackwell, 2008) argues that the field of theory, like other spheres of postmodern culture, has become overburdened with new terms and approaches, creating a need for maps and guides. Living with Theory maps contemporary theory, tracing its complex configurations, its political preoccupations, and its relations with literature. A defense of contemporary theory and cultural critique, the book explores the engagement of today's theory with such phenomena as globalization and postmodernism, multiculturalism and culture wars, plus the rise of neoliberalism and the corporate university. |
American Literary Criticism since the 1930s, Second Edition (Routledge, 2010) updates American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s, covering developments up to the present. A new final chapter narrates the distinctive story of the past two decades, interweaving key debates with more than a half dozen recent schools and movements of criticism. This narrative is in keeping with the book’s argument concerning the striking impertinence of the dominant schools and movements model of history following the disorganization of theory since the 1990s. The shift is symbolized by the widespread crossover phenomenon of recent times where critics characteristically fuse elements of various movements and schools, for example, Marxist feminist psychoanalytic queer theory. The standard schools and movements model of history does not work for literary criticism after as well as before the twentieth century. |
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