By John Frow
John Frow's ebook is a unique contribution to Marxist literary concept, presenting a reconciliation of formalism and historicism with the intention to identify the foundation for a brand new literary heritage. via a critique of his forerunners in Marxist conception (the historicist Marxism of Lukács, the paintings of Macherey, Eagleton, and Jameson), Frow seeks to outline the strengths and the constraints of this custom after which to increase its probabilities in an intensive transforming of the idea that of discourse. He develops the idea of literature as a traditionally particular process inside a community of discourses.
Frow is going directly to problematic a few primary theoretical different types and to discover the historic size of these different types. Drawing specifically on Russian Formalism, he develops a conception of the dynamics of literary swap and of the ancient pressures that form the literary process. He exams and extends his different types via readings of texts through Petronius, Hölderlin, DeLillo, Dickens, Frank Hardy, and others. the ultimate bankruptcy, a studying of Derrida and Foucault, poses the query of the potential for atmosphere limits to examining and the facility of limits to figure out literary background.
Read or Download Marxism and Literary History PDF
Best rhetoric books
Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication)
In Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece, John Poulakos deals a brand new conceptualization of sophistry, explaining its path and form in addition to the explanations why Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle came across it objectionable. Poulakos argues right realizing of sophistical rhetoric calls for a take hold of of 3 cultural dynamics of the 5th century B. C. : the common sense of situations, the ethic of festival, and the classy of exhibition. Traced to such phenomena as daily practices, athletic contests, and dramatic performances, those dynamics set the level for the position of sophistical rhetoric in Hellenic tradition and clarify why sophistry has characteristically been understood as inconsistent, agonistic, and ostentatious.
In his dialogue of historic responses to sophistical rhetoric, Poulakos observes that Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle stumbled on sophistry morally reprehensible, politically lifeless, and theoretically incoherent. even as, they produced their very own model of rhetoric that encouraged moral integrity, political unification, and theoretical coherence. Poulakos explains that those responses and replacement models have been inspired by means of a look for ideas to such ancient difficulties as ethical uncertainty, political instability, and social illness. Poulakos concludes that sophistical rhetoric used to be as valuable in its day as its Platonic, Isocratean, and Aristotelian opposite numbers have been in theirs.
At War with Metaphor: Media Propaganda and Racism in the War on Terror
At battle with Metaphor deals a compelling research of our public discussions of the conflict on terror and the binding conceptual metaphors wherein they're framed. analyzing the photographs of animal, insect, and affliction that form and restrict our figuring out of the battle, and tying those photographs to old and modern makes use of of propaganda and media filters, the authors discover how information media, together with political cartoons and speak radio, are enmeshed during this destructive, dehumanizing language.
That includes essays by way of popular students Michael J. Hyde, Theodore Kisiel, Mark Michalski, Otto Pöggeler, and Nancy S. Struever, this publication presents the definitive therapy of Martin Heidegger’s 1924 lecture path, “Basic options of Aristotelian Philosophy. ” A deep and unique interview with thinker Hans-Georg Gadamer, who attended the lecture direction, is additionally integrated.
How to Write Anything: A Guide and Reference with Readings with 2009 MLA and 2010 APA Updates
Click on the following to determine in regards to the 2009 MLA Updates and the 2010 APA Updates. Designed to be transparent and straightforward, how one can Write whatever re-imagines how texts paintings, with help for college kids anyplace they're of their writing procedure. The consultant, in components 1 and a couple of, lays out targeted suggestion for writing universal genres, whereas the Reference, in elements three via nine, covers the diversity of writing and study talents that scholars want as they paintings throughout genres and disciplines.
- Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action
- Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response
- On Second Language Writing
- Consolation in Philippians: Philosophical Sources and Rhetorical Strategy
- Wine, drunkenness, and the rhetoric of crisis in ancient Rome
- The Routledge Handbook of Linguistics
Additional resources for Marxism and Literary History
Example text
Its strength lies perhaps in its ability to explore the forms of gratification offered by even the most repressive ideologies. But for all the passion of Jameson's commitment to the utopian impulse,23 there seem to me good grounds for the reserve with which it is usually treated. The concept through which Jameson attempts to theorize the collective projection of desire is that of the Asiatic mode of production, with its consolidation of a dispersed collective unity in the image of the body of the despot (295).
What is problematic in Althusser's "antiteleological formula for history" (34) is that "it can readily be assimilated to the polemic themes of a host of contemporary poststructuralisms and post-Marxisms, for which History, in the bad sense – the reference to a 'context' or a 'ground,' an external real world of some kind, the reference, in other words, to the much maligned 'referent' itself – is simply one more text among others" (35). Against such an assimilation – but also in contrast to his own condemnation, in The Prison-House of Language, of the distinction between the concrete and the concrete-in-thought as "essentially a replay of the Kantian dilemma of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself"21 – Jameson now welds together two, seemingly incompatible propositions in a "revised formulation" of Althusser's thesis: on the one hand there is an insistence "that history is not a text, not a narrative, 'master' or otherwise"; on the other the concession "that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself [in Lacan's sense ] necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious" (35).
This distinction between two levels of contradiction then makes it possible for Jameson to use a Greimassian semiotics of binary opposition to construct the system of ideological closure which the text works and transforms. The active and critical function of literary discourse is thereby redeemed, but at the expense, I think, of contradicting the initial model of imaginary – that is, ideological – resolution. What is at issue here – if I may worry at the problem a little longer – is the ontological distinction between levels of the real and the forms of mediation between them.