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Tag Archives: Literary Criticism
Classrooms and Correctness
David Denby discusses his book Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World.
Stanley Fish discusses his new book, Professional Correctness, which is an account of literary studies and political change.
The Death of Satan
Literary scholar Andrew Delbanco [NHC Fellow 1990-91, 2002-03] discusses his book, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. Delbanco explains the ways Americans have conceptualized and described evil in political, cultural, and literary terms from the 16th to the 20th centuries and concludes by discussing the future of the devil in American culture.
Literary Lives
A discussion of contemporary literary criticism and the common reader. David Ellis discusses his contribution to a new three-volume biography of the British writer, D. H. Lawrence.
African Americans Part 4
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., discusses his book, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press). Arnold Rampersad discusses his biography of Langston Hughes, available from Oxford University Press.
Theory and Practice
Myra Jehlen and Paul Hunter discuss the impact of theory on modern literary scholarship and criticism. Shannon Ravenel discusses her work as editor of The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties (Houghton Mifflin).
Story and Song
Eudora Welty sits for an interview at the National Humanities Center
Helen Vendler‘s recent books include Voices and Visions: American Poets (Random House) and The Music of What Happens: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (Harvard University Press).
Eudora Welty‘s recent books include One Writer’s Beginnings (Warner Books, 1985).
Posted in Episodes
Tagged Literary Criticism, Literature, Novelist, Poetry, Pulitzer Prize
1 Comment
Foreign Subjects: Languages and God in the Schools
Rosemary Feal and Joan Hinde Stewart dicuss foreign languages in American education–what’s popular, what’s not, teaching methods, and literary criticism and theory. Warren Nord and Ronald Sharp talk about the perils and rewards of teaching religion in American schools.
Uncommon Readers
David Daiches is the author of more than 30 books of literary history and criticism. He’s at work on a forthcoming study of the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on the founders of the United States.
The Rise of the Novel
According to Paul Hunter and Patricia Meyer Spacks, English fiction rose to prominence in the 18th-century at about the same time that autobiography became important in England’s cultural life, reflecting an interest on the part of the common reader in everyday life and in the concept of self. Early English novels were enormously popular, but they were also the object of sometimes harsh criticism. For example, the English author and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, declared that readers of novels were the young, the ignorant, and the idle.
Literary Inquiry Today Part 2
The English writer Thomas de Quincey said that All that is literature seeks to communicate power, all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge. Does de Quincey’s aphorism apply to literary creation and criticism today? According to George Steiner, the contemporary literary spotlight rests not so much upon the creators of literature–the poets, playwrights, and novelists–as upon critics and commentators. Why is this so? Is this good or bad?
Literary Inquiry Today Part 1
Does literature matter in everyday life? Beyond issues in formal education, how do literary creation and criticism relate to concerns and questions in politics and popular culture? By way of discussing the evolution of the American literary canon, the changing methods of literary criticism, and comments on her own feminist literary perspectives, Annette Kolodny offers some answers to those questions.
Women’s Literary Studies Part 2
As a recent political development attests, feminism is measurable by various yardsticks, among them cultural and literary criticism. What are some of the implications of feminism for the production and study of literature, in both historical and contemporary terms? Keywords: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Loisa May Alcott, feminist criticism
Women’s Literary Studies Part 1
What is feminist literary criticism? What are its premises, and how does it differ from other forms of literary study? Is literature marked by gender?
The Art of Literary Biography, Part 3 of 7; Commentary
Robert Martin discusses the craft of biography and the life and work of the British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). Martin begins by asserting the importance of presenting distinctive, revealing details from the life of the subject in biographical writing, and describes the process of discovering and selecting such details in his own study of Tennyson. In response to the question of what right biographers have to dig up information on historical figures, Martin suggests that the lives public figures and the dead are legitimate objects of study. He discusses the distinction between Tennyson’s public and private lives, and emphasizes the importance of letters for gaining insight into historical subjects, suggesting that their variety often makes them more useful to biographers than journals and diaries are. Martin then focuses on Tennyson’s fear of having inherited epilepsy, noting that this fear can be seen in Tennyson’s poetry but does not appear his letters. On the relationship between chronology and interpretation in biography, Martin emphasizes the importance of interpretation, noting that Tennyson’s life had been well-chronicled before he wrote his biography; Martin presents his task to be understand the internal motivations of his subject. Martin responds to the question of how social and intellectual movements affect the practice of biography, focusing on the importance of minimizing personal bias. He describes his enjoyment of the writing process, and his enthusiasm for making new discoveries about Tennyson’s life.
In the second segment (at 23:56), Robert Gingher delivers a commentary on the relationship between our work and our lives, asserting the importance of approaching life with curiosity and introspection.
At the time of this interview, Martin was professor emeritus of English at Princeton University and author of Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart. Gingher was an editorial writer and book critic in Greensboro, North Carolina.
This edition of Soundings was conducted by Wayne J. Pond.
Afro-American Culture, Literature, and Social Order Part 6
Houston Baker discusses the blues and their place in American culture. He begins by mentioning one definition of the blues: “a good man (or a good woman) feeling bad;” he suggests that the contradictory quality of a vibrant and seemingly happy expression of an essential sadness exemplifies the the African-American condition. Baker relates the origins of the blues to the “field holler” and plays a recorded example [at 4:15], a field holler sung by Leadbelly. This is followed by a recording of Sleepy John Estes singing “Rats in my Kitchen,” [at 6:08]. The discussion turns to the distinctions between blues and other early forms of African-American music, touching on spirituals and gospel music. A recording of the spiritual “There Is a Balm in Gilead” [at 10:09] is contrasted with a slow blues sung by Skip James, “Devil Got my Woman” [at 11:57]. In response to a question on whether only black listeners can really appreciate the blues, Baker argues that the definition of American needs to be expanded to embrace marginalized populations, and that listeners should use blues music as an opportunity to understand the experience of black people. Baker then offers a recording [at 16:38] of Robert Johnson singing “Crossroad Blues” as an example of an expression of the experience of marginalization and estrangement. Baker suggests that scholarly attention to the blues is important as part of a larger examination of the vernacular tradition in America, and that understanding the blues can provide access to an understanding of the diversity of American culture. The discussion concludes with a focus on the blues as being ideologically motivated; he argues that the blues flow from an “economics of slavery,” and suggests that whereas early blues music was “created from behind a mule,” blues music of the 1960s through the 1980s (along with jazz and other genres) reflects the political struggles of the Civil Rights era.
At the time of this interview Baker was Eugene A. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, and had recently completed a fellowship (1982-83) at the National Humanities Center, during which he worked on his book Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory.
This edition of Soundings was conducted by Wayne J. Pond.