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Saturday, April 01, 2006
The Best Introduction To . . .
Important: Please leave comments and/or suggestions in here for the time being. The Valve is currently having difficulties with updating posts, and as this post is designed to be updated frequently, well, that causes some problems. I will update that list until The Valve cooperates, then I’ll resume updating here.
It all started when I was an undergraduate. One morning I woke up and decided to read a general history of every single American state. I made it through four or five before tiring of the genre. At the time I wish I had a list of the best history of each state. I asked a history professor of mine if such a list existed and was informed that not only did no list exist, but that the labor required to create one would boggled his imagination. Needless to say, all of this happened when the WWW was in its infancy and blogs but a twinkle in its eye. I thought perhaps I could cull a decent one from Wikipedia entries, but a cursory examination of topics upon which I have some expertise revealed that those references are of dubious quality. Then I thought: I can start a movement. So I sent Ralph an email about the state history project. (About ten minutes ago. Some nerve he has, not replying yet.) But I can start a little something here.
My choice of both category and best book concerning it is intended as a way to begin the discussion. I can only work with what I’ve read. (Some areas I’ve read around in but can’t think of a qualifier for “best introduction.") This project has the possibility to demonstrate the real strength of the distributive intelligence review process. Please suggest additional categories and alternative selections, as my list is no way authoritative or exhaustive. I also want to avoid “representative” works, i.e. the best introduction to psychoanalysis being The Interpretation of Dreams. I want books which cover a wider swath than a single work by a representative figure can.
Note: All categories and/or periods contain all the problems inherent to categorization and periodization. I also imagine that there must be a better way to organize this list, as this somewhat chronological organization seems unwieldy. I expect many edits to both the body of this post and the substance of the list.
Literature or Literary Theory:
- Homeric:
- Presocratic:
- Aristotelian:
- Platonic:
- Horatian:
- Augustinian:
- Patristic:
- Anglo-Saxon:
- Early Medieval:
- Twelfth Century Renaissance:
- Medieval:
- Late Medieval:
- Italian Renaissance:
- Early Modern:
- English Renaissance:
- Elizabethan:
- Jacobean:
- Caroline:
- Commonwealth Period:
- Metaphyiscal Poetry:
- Neoclassical:
- Enlightenment:
- Age of Johnson:
- Early American:
- Captivity Narratives:
- Restoration:
- Augustun:
- Revolutionary American:
- Romantic:
- Gothic:
- Picaresque:
- Antebellum American:
- Pre-Raphaelite:
- Victorian:
- American Civil War:
- Slave Narratives:
- American Renaissance:
- Transcendalist:
- Domestic Fiction:
- Sentimental:
- Aestheticism and Decadence:
- Realist:
- Naturalist:
- American Modernist:
- British Modernist:
- Irish Modernist:
- Vorticist:
- Futurist:
- Russian Formalism:
- 1922: Reading 1922: Return to the Scene of the Modern
, Michael North
- The Jazz Age: Terrible Honesty
- The Harlem Renaissance:
- Social Realist:
- The Beats:
- The New York Intellectuals: The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930’2 to the 1980’s
- Southern Agrarian: The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism
- New Criticism: The New Apologists for Poetry
- Phenomenological: Truth and Method
- Geneva School: Critics of Consciousness
- Structuralism: Structuralist Poetics
- French Structuralism: History of Structuralism
- Freudian Psychoanalytic:
- Lacanian Psychoanalytic: Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight
- Bloomian:
- Post-Structural:
- Deconstructive: Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction
- Marxist: Considerations on Western Marxism
- Frankfurt School: The Dialectical Imagination
- Rhizomatic:
- Semiotic:
- Reception Theory:
- Reader-Response Theory: Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction
- Foucauldian: Saint Foucault
- First-Wave Feminist:
- Second-Wave Feminist: Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory
- Third-Wave Feminist:
- Post-Colonial:
- New Historicist: New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics
- Cultural Studies:
- Gender Studies:
- Queer Theory:
- African American:
- Asian American: Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance
- Chicano/Chicana:
- Posthuman:
Comments
settler Australian?
Looks like you’re trying to reinvent the wheel, to some degree. Why not just go to the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, and other such encyclopedias and anthologies?
One could Start a List of Lists—beginning with several anthologies/encyclopedias/bibliographies, and several other introductions, and several other selected works for any given categorization. I think that would also probably better help show the limitations and possibilities of the categorizing and listing both—perhaps attempting to determine the approximate number of anthologies, say, for any given category. And I would think some such voluminous online listing—especially if well indexed and cross-referenced with style and skill—could prove readable and interesting in its own right, and be perhaps quite useful. This sort of project reminds me in both direct and oblique ways of the unusual and absorbing anthology, The Limits of Art: A Critic’s Anthology of Western Literature--The Best that Has Been Written and Said ... Collected and Edited by Huntington Cairns.
Also, I might add, your listing and Cairn’s collection both (it now occurs to me, after the fact) are somewhat akin to the sort of thing I attempted at the links below, regarding social and political literary criticism—or, historical/sociological literary criticism as Edmund Wilson referred to it, and of which Edward Said was one of its most prominent recent practitioners:
http://www.socialit.org/bibliography1800sto1929.html
and
http://www.politicalnovel.org/politicalliterarycriticismfull.html
I neglected this little thread over here.
Laura, yes, that’s exactly the sort of systemic blindspot I hope a list like this can help correct. To my shame, I didn’t know there was a field of “settler Australian” literature. In fact, you’ll notice I don’t have any Australian fields up there. If you could provide me with a quick survey of the relevant ones, I’d appreciate it greatly.
Tony, the argument against The Norton‘s really against anthologies; they can’t adequately introduce someone to the import of a given movement. They can gesture, but a book-length monograph is far more substantial. And thanks for the list, which I’ll look over momentarily.
Sure, but part of my point is that in these anthologies and encyclopedias is where can be found many references to key book-length monographs.
Also, maybe it’s just me, but it seems bizarre even in a simple list to limit one’s introduction to a field to a single author—especially since, take the “field” I’m interested in (in that I focus on it), call it sociological criticism...it encompasses primarily, let alone secondarily, what also are developed or otherwise significant fields in themselves that go by various names: anarchist criticism, radical criticism, political criticism, Marxist/materialist criticism, proletarian criticism, socialist criticism, revolutionary criticism, culturally critical criticism, tendentious criticism, and so on.... Which introduction or overview from which field or subfield would be “representative” of sociological criticism, if any?
In any event, if I had to list one, I would list three, plus an author. Three from work written in the thirties:
---1932 V. F. Calverton’s The Liberation of American Literature
---1939 Bernard Smith’s Forces in American Criticism
---1941 Kenneth Burke’s The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action
---and the works of Edward Said
If I had to choose between those three works of the thirties, I would recommend, especially as an ice breaker for students today: Burke’s the Philosophy of Literary Form, which actually gets far more into criticism, theory, and analysis, far moreso than the largely historical overviews of Calverton and Smith’s work. So: Burke and Said (with asterisk references to Calverton and Smith), but how you actually categorize or list them, good luck…