Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

  • Apple
  • Android
  • Windows Phone
  • Android

To get the free app, enter your email address or mobile phone number.
Download to your computer
Kindle Cloud Reader
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Qty:1
FREE Shipping on orders with at least $25 of books.
Only 1 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Literature Against Itself... has been added to your Cart
Want it Saturday, April 23? Order within and choose Saturday Delivery at checkout. Details
Ship to:
Select a shipping address:
To see addresses, please
or
Please enter a valid US zip code.
or
+ $3.99 shipping
Used: Good | Details
Sold by Green_Earth_Books
Condition: Used: Good
Comment: Light shelving wear with minimal damage to cover and bindings. Pages show minor use. Help save a tree. Buy all your used books from Green Earth Books. Read. Recycle and Reuse.

Sorry, there was a problem.

There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Please try again.

Sorry, there was a problem.

List unavailable.
Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon
Flip to back Flip to front
Listen Playing... Paused   You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more
See all 2 images

Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society Paperback – August 1, 1995

by
Gerald Graff (Author)
› Visit Amazon's Gerald Graff Page
Find all the books, read about the author, and more.
See search results for this author
Are you an author? Learn about Author Central
Gerald Graff (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 3 customer reviews
See all 5 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions
Price
New from Used from
Hardcover
"Please retry"
—
$16.95 $0.98
Paperback
"Please retry"
$12.95
$10.05 $2.49
I Am Because We Are: Readings in Africana Philosophy by
Expand your horizons with nonfiction from the finest academic presses
I Am Because We Are has been recognized as a major, canon-defining anthology and adopted as a text in a wide variety of college and university courses. Learn more | See related books
$12.95 FREE Shipping on orders with at least $25 of books. Only 1 left in stock (more on the way). Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.
Back
  1. Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
    Gerald Graff
    5.0 out of 5 stars 1
    Paperback
    $23.07 Prime
  2. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education
    Gerald Graff
    3.5 out of 5 stars 4
    Paperback
    $16.24 Prime
  3. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind
    Gerald Graff
    4.4 out of 5 stars 12
    Paperback
    $25.00 Prime
  4. Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma
    Gerald Graff
    Paperback
Next
NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Product Details

  • Paperback: 276 pages
  • Publisher: Ivan R. Dee (August 1, 1995)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1566630975
  • ISBN-13: 978-1566630979
  • Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.7 x 8.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,156,876 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

    •  Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested In These Sponsored Links

  (What's this?)

Customer Reviews

5 star
67%
4 star
0%
3 star
33%
2 star
0%
1 star
0%
See all 3 customer reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers
Write a customer review

Top Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 starsGraff's Conflict: A Muddy Affair
By Martin Asiner on May 19, 2012
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
In LITERATURE AGAINST ITSELF, Gerald Graff sees literature in a war against itself. This "war" is far from a new one. How the reader sees a book is largely a matter of how a reader sees himself. The war occurs when competing ideologies attempt to claim the book as one of their own. The New Critics, Graff notes, tended to view texts as autotelic independent bodies that had a "core" of meaning--more or less. This core was what the deconstructionists would later term as a logocentric 'metaphysics of presence,' that would function as a totalizing grounding that anchors text to culture. The leading deconstructionist of modern times Jacques Derrida absolutely opposed any such grounding and in 1966 gave a speech at John Hopkins University that upset the rather neat anchored world that the New Critics had created a few decades earlier. Graff's contribution to this conflict is less an explication of competing theories of literary discourse than engaging in a meandering walkabout covering such disparate fields as the then current status of English education in America's colleges and universities and some trenchant comments on "How Not to Talk about Fiction" and on "How Not to Save the Humanities." (Graff's last two chapter titles)

What I find refreshing is Graff's openness concerning his ideological stance. He is an unabashed leftist, one who is deeply suspicious of all matters both literary and non-literary related to conservatism and the autotelic philosophy of the New Critics. He writes in his revised Preface to the 1995 edition that though some readers praised and assailed him "as a conservative, more alert readers saw clearly enough where my political sympathies lay.Read more ›
Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse
5.0 out of 5 starsAn outstanding book about literary theory
By VA Book Lover on May 15, 2003
Format: Paperback
This is an outstanding book about literary theory and the academy. A professor of mine recommended it to me as an undergraduate, along with Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction, and I found this one to be the more interesting, the more original, of the two. It is at once a history and a critique and has much to offer students and scholars alike. Unfortunately, Graff seems to have fallen prey in his later work to some of the sophistries that he criticized in this early work.
Comment 4 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse
5.0 out of 5 starsGerald Graff and the Future of Critical Pedagogy
By Robert A. Sandberg on March 21, 2009
Format: Paperback
In his early books, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979) and Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (1987), Graff took as his main subjects literary theory and the institutional history of departments of English and literature, respectively. LITERATURE AGAINST ITSELF continues to be of interest and value for its discussion and analysis of competing schools of literary theory; and the historical narrative of the history of the post-secondary teaching of English that informs PROFESSING LITERATURE continues to enlighten anyone interested in curriculum design and canon-making. But perhaps these two early books can also be appreciated for their having afforded Graff the opportunity to work out the foundational arguments and historical perspectives that enabled him in his later books -- Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992) and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003) -- to effectively argue and explain why students across the curriculum would benefit from a more critical style of pedagogy.Read more ›
Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society
Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more
This item: Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society
Set up a giveaway

There's a problem loading this menu right now.

Learn more about Amazon Prime.