Julie Rifkin - Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction

1. Chapter 1-7
2. Chapter 10-6
3. Chapter 10-7
4. Chapter 10-9
5. Chapter 2-11
6. Chapter 2-4
7. Chapter 5-6
8. Chapter 6-12
9. Chapter 7-9
10. Chapter 9-5
11. Chapter 9-7
12. Chapter 9-8

For Gabriel and Nathaniel

THIRD EDITION

Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan

This third edition first published 2017
2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 1998); Blackwell Publishing Ltd (2e, 2004)

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication data

Names: Rivkin, Julie, editor. | Ryan, Michael, 1951 editor.
Title: Literary theory : an anthology / edited by Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan.
Description: Third edition. | Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2017. | Includes bibliographical references, glossary, and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014427| ISBN 9781118707852 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781118718384 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: LiteraturePhilosophy. | LiteratureHistory and criticismTheory, etc.
Classification: LCC PN45 .L512 2017 | DDC 801dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014427

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Barbara Kruger: Untitled (No Radio), photograph 51" 68," 1988.
Collection Don/Doris Fisher, San Francisco, courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

This book began, as one might guess, in the classroom. We have been teaching courses in contemporary literary theory for the past two decades, and we have each had the familiar experience of not being able to match the design of our courses to any anthology currently available. The move from awkwardly assembled xerox packets to an actual anthology has been both a natural outgrowth of our teaching and an astonishingly complex process of research, selection, and projection. For although the germ of the book was our own classroom(s), its destination has always been many classrooms, courses no doubt much different than any we ourselves might teach, and yet ones that our selections would ideally work both to accommodate and to enrich.

The scale of the volume is one expression of its projected flexibility; we felt that an anthology of literary theory needed not only to cover the range of theoretical perspectives or approaches that characterize the era after the New Criticism, the era that we take to be that of contemporary literary theory, but also to represent those perspectives with reasonable depth and range. The effect of such a decision, we hope, is that many kinds of courses will find a home in these selections, that a course that takes as its focus Structuralism, PostStructuralism, PostColonialism, or Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies will find this anthology as useful as one that makes a more extensive survey of theoretical perspectives.

The anthology opens with formalisms both Russian and American in a gesture that marks its organization as partly chronological and partly heuristic. That is, we take formalism at least in its American avatar of New Criticism to mark the condition of students theoretical awareness before beginning the journey into theory. To the degree that they have been taught a form of close reading as the basic task of literary analysis, they are practicing formalists, though the practice may be, like that of the prosespeaking M. Jourdain in Molires Bourgeois Gentilhomme, an unselfconscious one. Exploring the theoretical premises of a New Critical practice, placing those in conjunction with a historically unrelated yet theoretically cognate predecessor, Russian Formalism, seems like an appropriate way to initiate an exposure to theory in its less familiar guises.

The parts themselves have undergone many evolutions; the issue of where to draw the lines, what denomination to use, and where to locate certain selections has been as theoretically complex as it has been practically consequential. While Deconstruction, for example, enjoyed a separate life in literary critical history in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, we felt it more appropriate to place it within its historical and intellectual French context, and so you will find Derrida amongst Deleuze and Guattari, and Baudrillard under PostStructuralism. The question of how to categorize some kinds of theory, regarding gender, for example, was also difficult, and we opted for a big tent: A separate section could easily have been devoted to any number of theoretical projects, each of which has already produced its own classic texts, and while attending to these developments has been one goal of the anthology, we wished as well to embrace both the heterodox and the newly canonical. Some of the names in our table of contents may not be readily recognizable for this reason, and our inclusion of these texts is less a sign of presumption regarding future canonicity than it is an indicator of our desire to locate the anthology as much in the contemporary realm as possible. That has meant guessing, and we based our guesses on what we felt would be exciting or helpful in the classroom.

In a desire both to be as inclusive as possible and to represent works not commonly anthologized, we have done a certain amount of excerpting. Our principle has been to represent the core of a given work, and if, to that end, we have sacrificed portions of texts that readers will deem necessary, we can only suggest that our selections constitute a useful beginning to a more extensive acquaintance. We apologize in advance for any such textual editing deemed brutal.