Best of
Literary-Criticism

1972

Dissemination


Jacques Derrida - 1972
    . . . Derrida's central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosophy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives—against the grain of language—to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature—on the other hand—flaunts its own meretriciousness, abandons itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In Dissemination—more than any previous work—Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to 'deconstruct' both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to the literature of truth."—Peter Dews, New Statesman

Sincerity and Authenticity


Lionel Trilling - 1972
    In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life--and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.

The Senses of Walden


Stanley Cavell - 1972
    This expanded edition includes two essays on Emerson.

An Essay On Shakespeare's Sonnets


Stephen Booth - 1972
    

A Sherlock Holmes Commentary


D. Martin Dakin - 1972
    

Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays, 1952-1972


Gore Vidal - 1972
    The forty-four essays in this collection range in subject matter from pornography, the Kennedys, Tarzan, Yukio Mishima, Norman Mailer and paranoid politics.

Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century


William Barrett - 1972
    

The Black Aesthetic


Addison Gayle Jr. - 1972
    

The Essential Marx


Karl Marx - 1972
    Compact and fascinating, this invaluable work not only presents Marx's thoughts in his own words but also places them in the swirling context of the 20th century. A critical analysis of ideas that have influenced millions of lives for well over a century, this book will be an important addition to the libraries of students and instructors of economics, history, government, and Communist thought.

How I Wrote Jubilee: And Other Essays on Life and Literature


Margaret Walker - 1972
    The autobiographical essays reflect on her work and her life as an artist, as African-American, and a woman, while the literary essays examine the writings of such giants as Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, Phyllis Wheatley, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and others. "Spanning a half-century (1943to 1988), these brilliant, intimate writings capture the flavor of the times and powerfully convey the social and literary thoughts that distinguishes Walker as one of the intellectual beacons of her generation."-Booklist

Promises, Promises


Adam Phillips - 1972
    It confirms Adam Phillips as a virtuoso performer able to reach far beyond the borders of psychoanalytic discourse into art, drama, poetry and history. This collection gives us insights into anorexia and cloning, the work of Tom Stoppard and A.E. Housman, the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, Nijinsky's diary and Martin Amis's Night Train, and provides a case history of clutter. In a final essay, the author turns to the question - why sign up for analysis when you could read a book?Promoting everywhere a refreshing version of a psychoanalysis that is more committed to happiness and inspiration than to self-knowledge or some absolute truth, Promises, Promises reaffirms Adam Phillips as a writer whose work, in the words of one reviewer, 'hovers in a strange and haunting borderland between rigour and delight.'

The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber


Charles S. Holmes - 1972
    

Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry


Paul Goodman - 1972
    

Prose for Borges


Charles Hamilton Newman - 1972
    

T. S. Eliot (Writers and critics)


Northrop Frye - 1972
    

An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen & Siegfried Sassoon,


Arthur E. Lane - 1972
    

A Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway


Arthur Waldhorn - 1972
    Hemingway scholar Arthur Waldhorn's lively, personal style and his clear-eyed view of Ernest Hemingway makes this book not just an exegesis for the scholar but for general readers as well.

The Spain Of Fernando De Rojas; The Intellectual And Social Landscape Of La Celestina


Stephen Gilman - 1972
    Stephen Gilman's La Celestina and the Spain of Fernando de Rojas adds a new dimension to critical studies of the fifteenth-century masterpiece. Using the text of La Celestina as well as public and private archives in Spain, Mr. Oilman builds up a vivid sense of the man behind the dialogue and establishes Fernando de Rojas indisputably as its author--a figure whom critics, while ranking his novel second only to Don Quixote, have treated as semi-anonymous or non-existent.We cannot really know what the Celestina is, says Mr. Oilman, without speculating as rigorously and as learnedly as possible both on how it came to be and on how it could come to be. Thus he reconstructs the world of Rojas, country lawyer and converso, the social, religious, and intellectual milieu of Salamanca, of Spain during the Inquisition, of the converted Jew. He makes it possible for us to see the author--the law student writing feverishly during a fortnight's vacation from classes--in the context of his own times and thus to understand Rojas' achievement: his unconventionality; his sardonic judgment of the Spain in which he lived; the explosive originality, in fact, of La Celestina.Originally published in 1972.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.