He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe.Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.

    Le Guin as America’s greatest writer of science fiction, they just might have undersold her legacy. It’s hard to look at her vast body of work?novels and stories across multiple genres, poems, translations, essays, speeches, and criticism?and see anything but one of our greatest writers, period.In a series of interviews with David Naimon (Between the Covers), Le Guin discusses craft, aesthetics, and philosophy in her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction respectively. The discussions provide ample advice and guidance for writers of every level, but also give Le Guin a chance to to sound off on some of her favorite subjects: the genre wars, the patriarchy, the natural world, and what, in her opinion, makes for great writing. With excerpts from her own books and those that she looked to for inspiration, this volume is a treat for Le Guin’s longtime readers, a perfect introduction for those first approaching her writing, and a tribute to her incredible life and work.

    Employing examples of world literature from ancient times to the present, he provides a conceptual framework for the examination of literature. In four brilliant essays on historical, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical criticism, he applies "scientific" method in an effort to change the character of criticism from the casual to the causal, from the random and intuitive to the systematic.Harold Bloom contributes a fascinating and highly personal preface that examines Frye's mode of criticism and thought (as opposed to Frye's criticism itself) as being indispensable in the modern literary world.

    Literary Criticism. The two discussions in WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN took place at the offices of n+1 in the summer of 2007. Eleven n+1 editors and contributors--including Caleb Crain, Meghan Falvey, Mark Greif, and Ilya Bernstein--met to talk frankly about regrets they have (or don't have) about college--what they wish they had read or had not read, listened to or not listened to, thought or not thought, been or not been. The idea for the discussions was prompted by a desire to give college students a directed guide, of some sort, to the world of literature, philosophy, and thought that they might not otherwise receive from the current highly specialized university environment. They were also an attempt to answer the "canon"-based approach to college study in two ways: by identifying canonical books produced by our contemporaries or near-contemporaries--something conservative writers have always refused to do--and, second, by articulating a better reason to read the best books ever written than that they authorize and underwrite a system of brutal economic competition and inequality.

    Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

    Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?

    The author also considers the stories of nations and how these may affect the way a national identity can emerge from stories. He looks at the stories of Romulus and Remus in the founding of Rome, the hidden agenda of stories in the antagonism between Britain and Ireland and how stories of alienation in film such as Aliens and Men in Black reveal often disturbing narratives at work in projections of North American national identity. Throughout, On Stories stresses that far from heralding the demise of the story, the digital and supposedly postmodern era opens up powerful new ways of thinking about narrative.

    The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.This entirely new edition, edited for the English-language audience with the approval of Eco himself, includes an authoritative introduction by David Robey that explores Eco's thought at the period of The Open Work, prior to his absorption in semiotics. The book now contains key essays on Eco's mentor Luigi Pareyson, on television and mass culture, and on the politics of art. Harvard University Press will publish separately and simultaneously the extended study of James Joyce that was originally part of The Open Work, entitled The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. The Open Work explores a set of issues in aesthetics that remain central to critical theory, and does so in a characteristically vivid style. Eco's convincing manner of presenting ideas and his instinct for the lively example are threaded compellingly throughout. This book is at once a major treatise in modern aesthetics and an excellent introduction to Eco's thought.

    'For the specialist in the study of narrative structure, this is a solid and very perceptive exploration of the issues salient to the telling of a story-whatever the medium. Chatman, whose approach here is at once dualist and structuralist, divides his subject into the 'what' of the narrative (Story) and the 'way'(Discourse)... Chatman's command of his material is impressive.'

    -- Alan Dundes. Propp's work is seminal...[and], now that it is available in a new edition, should be even more valuable to folklorists who are directing their attention to the form of the folktale, especially to those structural characteristics which are common to many entries coming from even different cultures. -- Choice

    One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon.For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."

    Chapters on each element of poetry offer a wide-ranging general account and end by looking at different poems, to build up sustained analytical readings.The second edition--fully revised, expanded, updated, and supported by a new companion website--confirm The Poetry Handbook as the best guide to poetry available in English.

    Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri's Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?), Delany also examines the condition of the contemporary creative writer and how it differs from that of the writer in the years of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the high Modernists. Like a private writing tutorial, About Writing treats each topic with clarity and insight. Here is an indispensable companion for serious writers everywhere.

    Adopting what is essentially a structuralist approach, the author identifies and names the basic constituents and techniques of narrative and illustrates them by referring to literary works in many languages.

    A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a page - a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so - and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our beloved - or reviled - literary figures.In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literature - he thinks of himself first, and foremost, as a reader - into what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading.