From the sublime to the bizarre, he writes about 50 classic movies.

    She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together--that they form a sequence in which Keats pursued a strict and profound inquiry into questions of language, philosophy, and aesthetics.Vendler describes a Keats far more intellectually intent on creating an aesthetic, and on investigating poetic means, than we have yet seen, a Keats inquiring into the proper objects of worship for man, the process of soul making, the female Muse, the function of aesthetic reverie, and the ontological nature of the work of art. We see him questioning the admissibility of ancient mythology in a post Enlightenment art, the hierarchy of the arts, the role of the passions in art, and the rival claims of abstraction and representation. In formal terms, he investigates in the odes the appropriateness of various lyric structures. And in debating the value to poetry of the languages of personification, mythology, philosophical discourse, and trompe l'oeil description, Keats more and more clearly distinguishes the social role of lyric from those of painting, philosophy, or myth.Like Vendler's previous work on Yeats, Stevens, and Herbert, this finely conceived volume suggests that lyric poetry is best understood when many forms of inquiry--thematic, linguistic, historical, psychological, and structural--are brought to bear on it at once.

    I had the urge to poison a monk.' Along the way, it touches on bad books, ideal readers, historical form, and the metaphysics of the detective story.

    Author of Beginnings and the controversial Orientalism, Edward Said demonstrates that modern critical discourse has been impressively strengthened by the writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, for example, and by such influences as Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. He argues, however, that the various methods and schools have had a crippling effect through their tendency to force works of literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring the complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.The critic must maintain a distance both from critical systems and from the dogmas and orthodoxies of the dominant culture, Said contends. He advocates freedom of consciousness and responsiveness to history, to the exigencies of the text, to political, social, and human values, to the heterogeneity of human experience. These characteristics are brilliantly exemplified in his own analyses of individual authors and works.Combining the principles and practice of criticism, the book offers illuminating investigations of a number of writers--Swift, Conrad, Lukacs, Renan, and many others--and of concepts such as repetition, originality, worldliness, and the roles of audiences, authors, and speakers. It asks daring questions, investigates problems of urgent significance, and gives a subtle yet powerful new meaning to the enterprise of criticism in modern society.

    

    Authors include Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Muriel Spark, Anne Tyler, Italo Calvino, Henry Green, Robert Pinget, L.E. Sissman, R.K. Narayan and Roland Barthes. He also writes of actresses Louise Brooks and Doris Day and golfers Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer.

    From the special perspectives of "my corner of Europe," a classical and Catholic education, a serious encounter with Marxism, and a life marked by journeys and exiles, Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached, flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial.Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry, beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of man's animal origins. He examines the tendency of poets since Mallarme to isolate themselves from society, and stresses the need for the poet to make himself part of the great human family. One chapter is devoted to the tension between classicism and realism; Milosz believes poetry should be "a passionate pursuit of the real." In "Ruins and Poetry" he looks at poems constructed from the wreckage of a civilization, specifically that of Poland after the horrors of World War II. Finally, he expresses optimism for the world, based on a hoped-for better understanding of the lessons of modern science, on the emerging recognition of humanity's oneness, and on mankind's growing awareness of its own history.

    But until Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives - their behavior, values, and relationship to society. As Jack Zipes convincingly shows, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture.For this new edition, the author has revised the work throughout and added a new introduction bringing this classic title up to date.

    The book's first two parts, "Recollections" and "Interviews," provide autobiographical glimpses of the very private Larkin's childhood, his youth at Oxford, the genesis of his forty-year career as a librarian, and the influences that initially steered his poetry. The second half of the book reflects Larkin's literary standards and opinions in often witty and surprising, always beautifully wrought, essays and reviews. His subjects range from Emily Dickinson (were her first lines her best?) to the contemporary mystery novel. Required Writing concludes with a selection of pieces on jazz music."Larkin is a punctilious, honest critic. He prefers good clear writing to pretentious eyewash; he prefers tunes to discordant wailing; and he prefers home to abroad. Unlike the majority of critics, he is clear-sighted enough to say so." --A. N. Wilson, Sunday Telegraph"I read the collection with growing excitement, agreement and admiration. It is the best contemporary account of the writer's true aims I have encountered." --John Mortimer, Sunday Times (London)"Subtle, supple, craftily at ease, Required Writing is on a par with Larkin's poetry--which is just about as high as praise can go." --Clive James, Observer Philip Larkin was the author of poetry collections, including High Windows, The Whitsun Weddings, and The Less Deceived; a book of essays entitled All What Jazz: A Record Diary; and two novels, Jill, and A Girl in Winter, published early in his career. Required Reading was originally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

    Chapman provides the first comprehensive examination of Farmer's major themes and fiction, from his earliest writings to his bestseller, The Gods of Riverworld.

    Commenting on James's life, thought, and legacy, Barzun leaves us with a wise and civilized distillation of the great thinker's work.

    

    In this clear-sighted and enjoyable book, Cleanth Brooks, acknowledged to be "the best critic of our best novelist," introduces the general reader to Faulkner's most important novels and stories: The Sound and the Fury; As I lay Dying; The Hamlet; Go Down, Moses; Light in August; and Absalom, Absalom!  Brooks focuses on theme, character, and plot as well as on Faulkner's world—the fictional Yoknapatawpha County that provides a unique setting for Faulkner's tragicomic vision.

    

    To mark the book's twentieth anniversary, Kern provides an illuminating new preface about the breakthrough in interpretive approach that has made this a seminal work in interdisciplinary studies.From about 1880 to World War I, sweeping changes in technology and culture created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. Stephen Kern writes about the onrush of technics that reshaped life concretely--telephone, electric lighting, steamship, skyscraper, bicycle, cinema, plane, x-ray, machine gun-and the cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought--the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry, relativity, and the introduction of world standard time. Kern interprets this generation's revolutionized sense of past, present, and future, and of form, distance, and direction. This overview includes such figures as Proust Joyce, Mann, Wells, Gertrude Stein, Strindberg, Freud, Husserl, Apollinaire, Conrad, Picasso, and Einstein, as well as diverse sources of popular culture drawn from journals, newspapers, and magazines. It also treats new developments in personal and social relations including scientific management, assembly lines, urbanism, imperialism, and trench warfare. While exploring transformed spatial-temporal dimensions, the book focuses on the way new sensibilities subverted traditional values. Kern identifies a broad leveling of cultural hierarchies such as the Cubist breakdown of the conventional distinction between the prominent subject and the framing background, and he argues that these levelings parallel the challenge to aristocratic society, the rise of democracy, and the death of God. This entire reworking of time and space is shown finally to have influenced the conduct of diplomacy during the crisis of July 1914 and to havestructured the Cubist war that followed.

    In all but one of the extant Sophoclean dramas, a heroic figure who is compounded of the same literary elements faced a situation which is essentially the same. The demonstration of this recurrent pattern is made not through character-analysis, but through a close examination of the language employed by both the hero and those with whom he contends. The two chapters attempt to present what might, with a slight exaggeration, be called the "formula" of Sophoclean tragedy.A great artist may repeat a structural pattern but he never really repeats himself. In the remaining four chapters, a close analysis of three plays, the Antigone, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus, emphasizes the individuality and variety of the living figures Sophocles created on the same basic armature. This approach to Sophoclean drama is (as in the author's previous work on the subject) both historical and critical; the universal and therefore contemporary appeal of the plays is to be found not by slighting or dismissing their historical context, but by an attempt to understand it all in its complexity. "The play needs to be seen as what it was, to be understood as what it is."

    It looks at their social setting, and their purposes within it.

    

    But since World War II, an alternative cinema has emerged on a significant scale, particularly in Europe and Latin America- a cinema that challenges rather than soothes, that questions assumptions rather than reinforces them. This kind of film-'made in a spirit of resistance, rebellion and refusal'-is the focus of this important and stimulating study.

    This book contains the complete scripts of all five plays from the original TV drama series, clearly organised for reading or studying in class, with an introduction and suggestions for related work.

    It marks out lines of descent, identifies shifts in modes of narrative representation, considers literary changes in relation to the larger society, and thus offers the reader with a view of the novel not only in itself but also in history.

    Clay demonstrates that an appreciation of the thematic role of Athena's anger elucidates the poem's complex narrative organization and its conception of the hierarchical relations between gods and men. This edition includes a new introduction by the author.

    This book not only clarifies some of the more complex issues in the study of narrative but also provides a vivid tableau of the development of narratology over the decade between the two works.

    

    Advanced students will sharpen their reading, speaking, vocabulary, and writing skills as they discover the pleasure and reward of reading fiction. This anthology provides complete and unabridged selections by: Woody Allen . Kate Chopin . Nadine Gordimer . James Joyce . D.H. Lawrence . Bernard Malamud . Katherine Mansfield . William Maxwell . Frank O Connor . Grace Paley . Anne Petry . Budd Schulberg . James Thurber . Anne Tyler . Arturo Vivante . Kurt Vonnegut . Alice Walker . Tobias Wolf . Monica Wood . Virginia Woolf FeaturesFive new stories Updated author biographies Focus on Language sections that highlight grammatical structures and vocabulary Exploration of literary elements such as time, setting, action, and motive A wide variety of stimulating discussion and writing topics "Contents:Husbands, wives, and lovers. --Can-can / Arturo Vivante --The story of an hour / Kate Chopin --Epicac / Kurt Vonnegut --The legacy / Virginia Woolf --The Kugelmass episode / Woody Allen --An intruder / Nadine Gordimer --Parent and child. --Powder / Tobias Wolff --Mother / Grace Paley --A short digest of a long novel / Budd Schulberg --The rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence --The boarding house / James Joyce --My Oedipus complex / Frank O'Connor --Loneliness and alienation. --The model / Bernard Malamud --Disappearing / Monica Wood --Miss Brill / Katherine Mansfield --Teenage wasteland / Anne Tyler --Social change and injustice. --Like a winding sheet / Ann Petry --The lily-white boys / William Maxwell --The catbird seat / James Thurber --Everyday use / Alice Walker --Explanation of literary terms.

    But an information-processing society that neglects to pass on the real wisdom of [children's] tales and rhymes from one generation to another... will eventually become desiccated, distempered, and self-destroying." Childhood, he reminds us, is the time of "our earliest and deepest feelings and truths... our link to the past and a path to the future." And it is Cott's belief that the best children's books are not meant only for children; they are significant sources of delight and wisdom for grown-ups as well. In fact, as Cott argues, it is adults who may need children's books more than their offspring "lest ther be no more Wise Women or Wise Men."Pipers at the Gates of Dawn consists of Cott's reflections about and encounters with six extraordinary creators of children's literature - Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, William Steig, Astrid Lindgren, Chinua Achebe, P.L. Travers - and with Iona and Peter Opie, the great contemporary scholars of children's lore, games, and language. In seven broad-ranging, incisive essay-interviews, he explores with the authors themselves the lives of their created characters and the characters of their own lives. Despite differences in nationality, generation, and gender, all share with Cott an impassioned sense of the richness, complexity, and lucidity of childhood, and of the enduring importance of children's literature in the lives of all of us.

    Includes a brief analysis of each story.

    Examines the nature of music and traces the history of music philosophy from ancient Greece to the twentieth century.Lewis Rowell's Thinking About Music is more than an introduction to the connections between music and other arts, and the philosophical underpinnings of aesthetics.

    You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed... There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there still is a danger that you will stratify again everything, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes, couch grass is also a rhizome.Edited by Sylvere Lotringer, On the Line was the first book published in the new Foreign Agents series in 1983. It gathers together two seminal texts that Deleuze and Guattari would later elaborate on in A Thousand Plateaus. First delivered in French by Deleuze (drawing graphs on the blackboard) at the Schizo-Culture conference organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University in 1975, Rhizome introduced a new kind of thinking in philosophy, both non-dialectical and non-hierarchical. The two didn't expect this neo-anarchical blue-print would eventually offer an early template for the understanding of the internet. Rhizome substitutes pragmatic, couch grass, free-floating logic to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree. In Politics, superceding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze envisages the social macrocosm as a series of lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. It is, he emphasizes, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the becoming revolutionary. Throughout, he keeps dispelling the notion of capitalism as a repressive machine only meant to extract surplus value from exploited workers and suggest that it could be opposed from within by redirecting the creativity and multiplicity of its flows.The multiple must be made, not always by adding another dimension, rather in the simplest way, by dint of sobriety... A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radices. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes... Even some animals are, in their pack forms. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all their function of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout... The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couch grass.

    His awards include the Lannan Literary Award, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

    

    This full collection of these reviews nearly doubles the number that have appeared in print elsewhere and represents a significant body of primary materials from the O'Connor canon. We find in the reviews the same personality so vividly apparent in her fiction and her lectures--the unique voice of the artist that is one clear sign of genius. Her spare precision, her humor, her extraordinary ability to permit readers to see deeply into complex and obscure truths-all are present in these reviews and letters.

    Selznick produced

    D. Nuttall discusses English eighteenth-century and French neo-classical conceptions of realism, and considers Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and both parts of King Henry IV as a prolonged feat of mimesis, with particular emphasis on Shakespeare’s perception of society and culture as subject to historical change. Shakespeare is chosen as the great example of realism because he addresses not only the stable characteristics but also the flux of things, and he is thus seen as a perceiver of that flux and not a mere specimen. An acknowledged classic of literary studies, A New Mimesis is reissued here with a new preface by the author.

    Thomas is Wales's most eminent poet in the English language, and one of the most acclaimed poets writing in Britain today.

    A distinctive feature of Greek culture was an awareness of the power of words, and an interest in the interrelationships between persuasion (peitho), deception and violence. These issues figured with some prominence in Greek plays. Dr Buxton maintains that certain aspects of classical tragedy become clearer if we recognise what peitho meant to the Greeks. In the first part of his book, he attempts to 'excavate' the concept of peitho, uncovering its various associations in different areas of experience - politics, rhetoric, love, morality and philosophy. Armed with what he has discovered, he turns in the second part to an analysis of selected plays by Aischylos, Sophokles and Euripides in which persuasion plays a major role.

    His object is always to question orthodox readings inparticular those of the editors of the current Soviet edition, and to lay bare Dostoevsky's power to generate seemingly inexhaustable psychic energy in the form of his readers' diverse intellectual passions. This is a suggestive, unconventional, brilliantly seen yet rigorous exposition of oneof the greatest and most modern of 19th-century novelists.

    In 20 chapters, it shows the necessity of dealing with such unrelated artists as Milton Babbitt and Laurie Anderson, John Cage and Neil Young, Elliott Carter and David Byrne, and Philip Glass and Ornette Coleman.