The Educated Imagination


Northrop Frye - 1963
    Dr. Frye offers, in addition, challenging and stimulating ideas for the teaching of literature at lower school levels, designed both to promote an early interest and to lead the student to the knowledge and kaleidoscopic experience found in the study of literature.Dr. Frye's proposals for the teaching of literature include an early emphasis on poetry, the "central and original literary form," intensive study of the Bible, as literature, and the Greek and Latin classics, as these embody all the great enduring themes of western man, and study of the great literary forms: tragedy and comedy, romance and irony.

Ruminations on College Life


Aaron Karo - 2002
     It took college freshman Aaron Karo only one week to realize that college was a joke -- an especially funny one that he could share with his friends in a regular email newsletter about life on campus. By his senior year, Ruminations on College Life had become an international phenomenon. Now, for the first time in print, here is the best of the original ezine, previously unpublished material, and brand new introductions to each section by the author. Share in the absurdity and insanity of the college experience with Karo as you read his outrageous inside account of scheming students, crazy professors, confused parents, and rowdy frat boys. Perfect for anyone who is destined for college, currently surviving it, or already a veteran, this book is a cult classic readers can enjoy alone or read out loud at their next party for tons of laughs.

The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction


Frank Kermode - 1967
    Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revisits the book which brings his highly concentrated insights to bear on some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burrows, Kermode shows how they have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit. Kermode then discusses literature at a time when new fictive explanations, as used by Spenser and Shakespeare, were being devised to fit a world of uncertain beginning and end. He goes on to deal perceptively with modern literaturewith "traditionalists" such as Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, as well as contemporary "schismatics," the French "new novelists," and such seminal figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Whether weighing the difference between modern and earlier modes of apocalyptic thought, considering the degeneration of fiction into myth, or commenting on the vogue of the Absurd, Kermode is distinctly lucid, persuasive, witty, and prodigal of ideas.

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale


Marina Warner - 2014
    These fantastic stories have travelled across cultural borders, and been passed down from generation to generation, ever-changing, renewed with each re-telling. Few forms of literature have greater power to enchant us and rekindle our imagination than a fairy tale. But what is a fairy tale? Where do they come from and what do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality, and society? The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances and time; their history is entangled with folklore and myth, and their inspiration draws on ideas about nature and the supernatural, imagination and fantasy, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Marina Warner has loved fairy tales over her long writing career, and she explores here a multitude of tales through the ages, their different manifestations on the page, the stage, and the screen. From the phenomenal rise of Victorian and Edwardian literature to contemporary children's stories, Warner unfolds a glittering array of examples, from classics such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, the Grimm Brothers' Hansel and Gretel, and Hans Andersen's The Little Mermaid, to modern-day realizations including Walt Disney's Snow White and gothic interpretations such as Pan's Labyrinth. In ten succinct chapters, Marina Warner digs into a rich collection of fairy tales in their brilliant and fantastical variations, in order to define a genre and evaluate a literary form that keeps shifting through time and history. She makes a persuasive case for fairy tale as a crucial repository of human understanding and culture.

Bonifacio's Bolo


Ambeth R. Ocampo - 1995
    In Bonifacio's Bolo, Ambeth Ocampo adds even more interesting bits to another scrapbook of history.

Lonely Planet Ecuador & the Galapagos Islands


Regis St. Louis - 2009
    Our 8th edition gives you the tools you need to create your own adventure, whether you want to browse colorful handicrafts at Otavalo's Saturday market, climb active Volcan Cotopaxi, swim with the Galapagos penguins or relax in chilled-out Vilcabamba.Lonely Planet guides are written by experts who get to the heart of every destination they visit. This fully updated edition is packed with accurate, practical and honest advice, designed to give you the information you need to make the most of your trip.In This Guide:Dedicated Outdoors chapter: hiking, biking, surfing and kayakingInsightful, respectful coverage of Ecuador's rich indigenous culturesGreen Index identifies sustainable options

Ugly Feelings


Sianne Ngai - 2005
    In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

Classical Literary Criticism


Penelope Murray - 2000
    In Ion, Plato examines the god-like power of poets to evoke feelings such as pleasure or fear, yet he went on to attack this manipulation of emotions and banished poets from his ideal Republic. Aristotle defends the value of art in his Poetics, and his analysis of tragedy has influenced generations of critics from the Renaissance onwards. In the Art of Poetry, Horace promotes a style of poetic craftsmanship rooted in wisdom, ethical insight and decorum, while Longinus’ On the Sublime explores the nature of inspiration in poetry and prose. This edition of these landmarks texts includes an introduction by Penelope Murray, which discusses the literary background since Homer and sets the work of each critic in context. It also includes suggestions for further reading, a chronology and explanatory notes. Table Of Contents: Table of contents Introduction 1. Homer and the Early Greek Poets 2. Aristophanes 3. Gorgias and the Sophists 4. Plato 5. Aristotle 6. The Alexandrians 7. Horace 8. Longinus 9. Epilogue Further Reading Literary Chronology Plato Ion Republic 2 Republic 3 Republic 10 Aristotle Poetics Horace The Art of Poetry Longinus On the Sublime Notes

Junk English


Ken Smith - 2001
    With hundreds of new examples pulled from everyday life, Junk English 2 shows how our language has become so pliable and flabby that the more we read and hear, the less we know.

William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country


Cleanth Brooks - 1963
    Brooks shows that Faulkner's strong attachment to his region, with its rich particularity and deep sense of community, gave him a special vantage point from which to view the modern world.Books's consideration of such novels as Light in August, The Unvanquished, As I Lay Dying, and Intruder in the Dust shows the ways in which Faulkner used Yoknapatawpha County to examine the characteristic themes of the twentieth century. Contending that a complete understanding of Faulkner's writing cannot be had without a thorough grasp of fictional detail, Brooks gives careful attention to what happens: In the Yoknapatawpha novels. He also includes useful genealogies of Faulkner's fictional clans and a character index.

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography


Roland Barthes - 1980
    Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.

Ulysses Annotated


Don Gifford - 1974
    Annotations in this edition are keyed both to the reading text of the new critical edition of Ulysses published in 1984 and to the standard 1961 Random House edition and the current Modern Library and Vintage texts.Gifford has incorporated over 1,000 additions and corrections to the first edition. The introduction and headnotes to sections provide general geographical, biographical and historical background. The annotations gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, trace literary allusions and references to other cultures.The suggestive potential of minor details was enormously fascinating to Joyce, and the precision of his use of detail is a most important aspect of his literary method. The annotations in this volume illuminate details which are not in the public realm for most of us.

The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature


Edward James - 2012
    From the ghost stories of the Gothic to the zombies and vampires of twenty-first-century popular literature, from Mrs Radcliffe to Ms Rowling, the fantastic has been popular with readers. Since Tolkien and his many imitators, however, it has become a major publishing phenomenon. In this volume, critics and authors of fantasy look at its history since the Enlightenment, introduce readers to some of the different codes for the reading and understanding of fantasy, and examine some of the many varieties and subgenres of fantasy; from magical realism at the more literary end of the genre, to paranormal romance at the more popular end. The book is edited by the same pair who produced The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (winner of a Hugo Award in 2005).

Black Orpheus


Jean-Paul Sartre - 1956
    Translation of: Orphee noir, originally published 1948 as the preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue francaise, edited by Leopold Sedar Senghor.

Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives


Sidonie Smith - 2001
    But what’s involved in bringing these narratives into the classroom—in creative writing, cultural studies, women’s and ethnic studies, and social science and literature courses? How may instructors engage the philosophical, historical, social, and theoretical contexts of the emerging field of autobiography studies?Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, two authorities in life narrative studies distill their diverse forays into life writing in a concise yet far-reaching overview of key terms, issues, histories, and texts in autobiography studies. Reading Autobiography is a step-by-step introduction to the differences of self-narrative from fiction and biography; the components of autobiographical acts; such core concepts as memory, experience, identity, agency, and the body; the textual and critical history of the field; and prospects for future research. Organized as a user-friendly handbook, it includes a glossary of key words, suggestions for teaching, and extensive primary and secondary bibliographies. Sidonie Smith is professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. Julia Watson is associate professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University.