Customer Reviews

Critical Terms for Literary Study

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The book provides a very useful guide to terms ranging from Lacanian desire to narrative. Each author discusses the history of the term and its current use and then goes on to use the term to inform their own critical reading of a specific text or texts, providing a very useful illustration of the term's implications.

I am impressed by this text, with one caveat. At my school it is used as a graduate level textbook and that is probably the appropriate level.

I am an undergrad and I enjoy this book immensely. I'm constantly finding explanations (finally!) for most of the indecipherable ideas embedded in the critical articles I have to use for literature papers. It's giving me the language to interrogate texts and making my reading experiences much more meaningful. This book gives me food for thought for days.

But if it's brain food, it's definitely health food, maybe even crunchy and vegan. There is some truth in the other reviewers' impression that the essays can come out on the pretentious side. This stuff is hard on the modern entertainment-loving brain, unless your brain is entertained by a challenge. I love this book, but I pace myself to about a chapter a month. Since there are 28 chapters, it's going to take me about 2 years to get through it!

The book it is an excellent compendium of complex ideas. The ideas are never cheated of their complexity and their originators are never given short shrift. It can be gotten through in a semester, but only by using selections. Don't be afraid of this book. It's even reasonably priced. But if you try to foist it on undergrads, you might be buying a rebellion.

A better text for a fast and dirty overview could be Peter Barry's "Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory." ISBN: 0719062683. I was taught this book at another school and it's great if you're looking for conversational, succinct, 12-page chapters on all the major schools, in chronological order. But you won't get a deep understanding from Barry's book, and it will only frustrate those who actually want an understanding they can take away long after they put the book down.

I bought a Kindle edition so I wouldn't have to carry the book back and forth; I use it in my teaching. The Kindle edition has only 22 of the 28 essays. Beware if you plan to use the Kindle edition as a substitute for the printed book.

While I agree that this is not a text that delves deep into the theories of Lacan or Derrida or Fish or any of the others, it is not intended to do so. I have found it to be an excellent tool for introducing my high school Advanced Placement students to the world of literary criticism. Certainly some of the articles can get wordy or bogged down in "technical" detail, but literary criticism has never been for the reader who wants to skim and get the assignment "over with." Any critical theory takes time and patience to work through; critical theory questions ideas and requires a commitment on the part of the reader to think, question, and engage with the text. There are some essays that younger students simply do not have the skills for yet but there are others that are quite accessible to them. In particular, my students found the essays on Representation, Structure, Race, and Canon very interesting.

This source has one significant advantage over many other texts. For each article, there is an immediate application of the technique to a well-known piece of literature. I know that my students reading of Appiah's essay on race dramatically impacted how they interpreted Shakespeare's play Othello and then later Schuyler's novel Black No More. While neither my students nor I always agree with what the critics are saying, I have found the book a great starting point for discussion.

My first encounter with this text was as an undergrad, and I, like a couple of other reviewers found it baffling, and I held it with disdain. Later, as a graduate student, I actually dropped a course because when I purchased my texts, this was one of them. Now, fifteen years later, with higher education degrees and ten years of teaching experience under my belt, I actually find the essays interesting because I can relate to several of the points. They are very deep theoretically, and often philosophical, and I certainly would not recommend this to anyone for a bit of light reading. However, I must finally admit that, for the proper audience, this text is quite useful and even enjoyable in the sense that it presents and discusses complex aspects and quandaries of not only literature, but life. Fifteen years ago, even the essays I could almost comprehend left me asking "who cares?" but now I look at them and say "how interesting!"

If you are looking for an easy introduction to literary criticism, than look no further!!.... for a different book. This book is a collection of essays that are poorly written and constructed, have almost no point or conclusion and for the most part leave the reader thinking, "whaaa?".In almost ever essay they use very large ambiguous words and quote many authors but actually don't define the term they're given. They end up using poor examples to express a word they forgot to define in the trample of nonsense. All in all the title of the book should be Irony because it's written by english professors.

This book is an anthology of essays describing some important aspects of literature and criticism. It's a really good idea, but badly done here. The book identifies itself as 'a landmark introduction to the work of literary theory' and claims to be suitable for 'the reader beginning to learn about critical theory.' A more accurate description might be, 'written by stuffy, self-important old people for same to enjoy.'

The editors seem to have taken great pains to select works written by people who feel a need to choose the longest word they can find to represent an idea; if a suitably long word does not exist, they combine a word with prefixes and suffixes until they are satisfied. There is no reason to write like this, especially if you're trying to teach someone something. The chapters of the book can be translated into speaking man's English to good effect, and every one of the 28 critical terms really is simple enough to explain without the comically frequent fallback on Latin phrases and words.

I don't know why so many people think this is a great book. Maybe because it's filled with words like 'prosopopoeia,' which is, I'll admit, a valid English word, but a little bit limited in its general use among readers beginning to learn about critical theory. The flow of the essays becomes stinted by the necessity of referring to a dictionary at every fourth word and then translating the resulting mess into a sentence that normal people understand.

In short, this is a bad textbook. The authors have hidden very simple concepts behind such a thick wall of confusing use of language and terminology that the reader becomes a gold miner, chipping away at the useless mountain of words before him to extract what little vein of content he can find.

this book is the devil! i am using it in a lit studies course and loathe every second i waste reading these essays. they seem to be written mostly by stuffy university professors who are attempting to sound like they know what they are talking about. It is not a dictionary, nor does it help the reader properly understand a term. If you are curious about a word that is discussed in the book, i suggest looking it up in the dictionary. it's easier. and you'll actually learn what the word means without having to search through thick sentences that really make no sense and large words that you know the author just pulled out of a thesauraus.