A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (The Language Library) Review

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A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (The Language Library) ReviewYou get a lot of value for the money with this one. For a reasonable price you get almost 1000 pages of literary information. Every obscure literary term imaginable is here, but that's not why I am taking the time to praise this handy little volume. It's a browsers dream.
What I found most interesting were the lengthy sections on genres. There are pages devoted to specific types of novels, dramas, and poems. There are luxuriously long sections on science fiction novels, crime fiction, pastoral writings, short stories, gothic fiction, comic drama, and a host of other such topics. When you go to the short story section, for instance, you will find 12 pages dedicated to coverage of authors and their works dating from biblical times to the present (1998). I quickly found recommended writers that I hadn't known along with those I was well acquainted with. Although this book was inexpensive, I have spent many times its purchase price buying new books that I found referenced in this Dictionary. There are no individual entries for authors or their works in this book. For that you need to go to books like the Oxford, Cambridge, New York Public Library or Benet's literature reference works.
In poetry sections you will find examples of the type of verse being discussed. You will be amused at some of the entries provided under "light verse" and "limericks". There is even a heading for "shaggy dog story".
Any weaknesses to the book? Well there are a few. This book has a single author, unlike many reference works that have a group of contributors. This can lead to weak sections that are outside the solo author's expertise. Every reader will find a favorite author or two missing from the genre sections. I was appalled, for instance, to find no mention of Flannery O'Connor in the section on American short story authors. As the author is English, there may also be a slight bias toward English writers. I was also somewhat annoyed that Mr. Cuddon often -but not always- didn't take the time to give a foreign title its English translation. Would it have hurt him to list the Victor Hugo novel as "Toilers of the Sea" instead of "Les Travailleurs de le Mer"?
I am a hopeless book addict, and this little reference work really made my day(s).A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (The Language Library) OverviewThe fourth edition of J.A. Cuddon's classic dictionary has been thoroughly revised and updated to maintain it as the most comprehensive and accessible work of its kind currently available, for students, teachers and general readers alike. Expanded to include many new entries, it has been improved throughout, in places rendered more concise, in others amended and extended, with both major and minor additions. The work of the third edition, to cover the schools and various terminologies of literary theory is continued, without compromising coverage afforded to more traditional critical terms and topics.At this untimely death in 1996, Charles Cuddon, as he was known, had completed much of the revisory and updating work involved in preparing the edition. That work and other unfinished plans and outlines have since been overseen and developed by C.E. Preston of Sidney Sussex college, Cambridge, helped, as she acknowledges, by several of her academic colleagues. Among the entries extensively rewritten or newly contributed are:* "CrimeFiction",* "Dramatic Monologue",* "Ellipsis",* "Punctuation",* "Rhyme",* "Verse Novel", and* "Sonnet Cycle".After more than twenty years in print, Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory remains "a superlative work of reference that will be read for pleasure", just as it was acclaimed to be when first published in 1976. There is now no better memorial to its author's extraordinary polymathy and literary scholarship.

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Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books Review

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Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books ReviewFor forty years, Arnold Weinstein has wowed students at Brown University with his insightful and humanistic readings of the classics of Western literature. In Morning, Noon and Night, he presents a summa of his reading and places it in the context of the cycles of growing up and growing old that all of us experience. The breadth of his reading itself is miraculous - the book covers everything from Oedipus to Shakespeare to Faulkner and Joyce to Jonathan Safran Foer (and multitudes in between) and gives each writer the careful and original reading he or she deserves. Professor Weinstein's gift is to teach us how reading informs living, and how we can live better by learning to read better. This book should be read by anybody who cares about what it means to be human. Reading this book and Professor Weinstein's other books (in particular I recommend A Scream Goes Through the House and Recovering Your Story) is an opportunity to spend some time with one of the great humanists of our time.Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books Overview

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New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage Review

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New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage ReviewProvides the reader with a selection of what is considered american literature and the new additions to it by different inmigrant groups.
It is an attempt to include what is condidered the new literature in EU. Obviously it is not a complete representation, however it is an attempt to recognize the works of autors whose work has not being recognized in their home land or the homeland of their ancestors. It provides a sense of belonging to those artist who have the blessing of owning a diversity of backgrounds.New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage Overview

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The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy Review

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The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy ReviewDerrida deconstructs the simultaneous, yet not so simultaneous, process of logic and empirical sense. The point here is that of the birth of absolute knowledge, and Derrida shows that logic is a constitution of knowledge just as empirical sense. One can not begin without the other, so both supplement each other. Derrida shows that by reducing one, the other cannot proceed being without the other (i.e., genesis of knowledge, language, or consciousness). The contradiction that Husserl makes is that he keeps revolving back to an intention or intuition that prevents the subject (i.e., the human) from being seen as the object. Without objectivity, the philosophical horizon cannot be seen for what it really is, and if the subject is able to make any intention then obviously we haven't reached the genesis.
Even though Derrida hadn't coined a lot of his terms here, his thinking behind Deconstruction is there for the reader. This is a really good book to begin in order to understand what is in his later writings. I recommend Derrida's Origin of Geometry, Grammatology, and Speech and Phenomena after reading The Problem of Genesis.
I think a reader who has read much of his more modern works will see that Derrida's thinking is consistent up until his last works after reading this.The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy OverviewDerrida's first book-length work, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, was originally written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures in 1953 and 1954. Surveying Husserl's major works on phenomenology, Derrida reveals what he sees as an internal tension in Husserl's central notion of genesis, and gives us our first glimpse into the concerns and frustrations that would later lead Derrida to abandon phenomenology and develop his now famous method of deconstruction.For Derrida, the problem of genesis in Husserl's philosophy is that both temporality and meaning must be generated by prior acts of the transcendental subject, but transcendental subjectivity must itself be constituted by an act of genesis. Hence, the notion of genesis in the phenomenological sense underlies both temporality and atemporality, history and philosophy, resulting in a tension that Derrida sees as ultimately unresolvable yet central to the practice of phenomenology.Ten years later, Derrida moved away from phenomenology entirely, arguing in his introduction to Husserl's posthumously published Origin of Geometry and his own Speech and Phenomena that the phenomenological project has neither resolved this tension nor expressly worked with it. The Problem of Genesis complements these other works, showing the development of Derrida's approach to phenomenology as well as documenting the state of phenomenological thought in France during a particularly fertile period, when Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran-Duc-Thao, as well as Derrida, were all working through it. But the book is most important in allowing us to follow Derrida's own development as a philosopher by tracing the roots of his later work in deconstruction to these early critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology."A dissertation is not merely a prerequisite for an academic job. It may set the stage for a scholar's life project. So, the doctoral dissertations of Max Weber and Jacques Derrida, never before available in English, may be of more than passing interest. In June, the University of Chicago Press will publish Mr. Derrida's dissertation, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, which the French philosopher wrote in 1953-54 as a doctoral student, and which did not appear in French until 1990. From the start, Mr Derrida displayed his inventive linguistic style and flouting of convention."—Danny Postel, Chronicle of Higher Education

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Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Religion and Postmodernism Series) Review

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Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Religion and Postmodernism Series) ReviewArchive Fever - A Freudian Impression is the text of a lecture given by Jacques Derrida at the Freud Museum in London during an international colloquium entitled "Memory: The Question of Archives" organized by the Société Internationale d'Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychanalyse. The location, the theme of the conference, the title of the lecture, the list of persons present and absent: all matters enormously for the understanding of this text, which highlights a decisive aspect of Derrida's thought.
Freud's last house after he flew to London in 1938 became a museum after his daughter Anna passed away in 1982. It shelters part of Freud's personal archives, his library, his daughter's papers, and a research center on the history of psychoanalysis.
To paraphrase Derrida, Freud's house is used as a scene of domiciliation: it gives shelter, it assigns to residence, and it consigns, as it gathers together signs. As a place for archives [the word comes from the Greek arkheion, the residence of the superior magistrate], it is at once institutive and conservative. "It has the force of law, of a law which is the law of the house," writes Derrida. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. It opens "the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow". In the case of psychoanalysis, the conservation of archives raises specific questions: "What is this new science of which the institutional and theoretical archive ought by rights to comprise the most private documents, sometimes secret?" asks Derrida.
But the House of Freud is also the place of a lineage: that of the father of psychoanalysis, whom all analysts claim as ancestor, and also the lineage of an individual who was taken in his own web of kinship relationships, in particular with his father Jakob and with his daughter Anna. The private library contains a Philippsohn Bible that Sigmund Freud had studied in his youth and that his father, having rebound the volume in "a new skin", gave him back on his thirty-fifth birthday, inscribed with a personal dedication in Hebrew.
It may be possible to read into the text of the dedication an allusion to Freud's circumcision, although the point is a matter of debate. But the gift of the father refers unambiguously to Freud's Jewish heritage: as a child Sigmund Freud had been "deeply engrossed" in the reading of the Bible, and as an adult he was still able to decipher his father's handwritten inscription in Hebrew, which renewed the covenant passed when the Book was first given.
This question of deferred obedience to the father, and of allegiance to the Law, was also taken up by Freud's daughter Anna. In 1977, she was invited by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to inaugurate an endowed chair carrying the name of her long dead father. Unable to go, she sent a written statement which acknowledges, among other things, that the accusation according to which psychoanalysis is a "Jewish science", "under present circumstances, can serve as a title of honour."
This is the main point Derrida wants to get at. It has now become difficult to discuss Freud and psychoanalysis without any reference to Judaism. Freud, of course, vehemently denied the notion of a Jewish science, and he emphasized the universal (non-Jewish) essence of psychoanalysis, although he sometimes hinted--in the private archives unearthed by historians--the influence of his Judaism or Jewishness over the elaboration of the new science.
This debate was forcefully addressed by the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Yerushalmi, who "discovered" the Hebrew dedication in Freud's Bible, is the absentee to which Derrida's lecture is addressed. Indeed, the whole text could have been condensed in the two words of a dedication, a "To Yerushalmi" that would also have echoed the greetings that Jews exchange at the Passover Seder and at Yom Kippur.
As Yerushalmi himself notes, the notion of a Jewish science will very much depend on how the very terms Jewish and science are to be defined. Derrida remarks that "only the future of science, in particular that of psychoanalysis, will say whether this science is Jewish, because it will tell us what science is and what Jewishness is." Following Yerushalmi, Derrida posits that if Judaism is terminable, Jewishness is interminable: it is "precisely the waiting of the future, the opening of a relation to the future, the experience of the future" as an event radically to come. In other words, it is "the affirmation of affirmation, the yes to the originary yes" that deconstructionist theologians like John Caputo sum up as a double "oui-oui".
But to Derrida the question of Freud's relation to Judaism also covers a more personal aspect. He refers in a parenthesis to himself as "I who have not only a father named Hayim, but also, as if by chance, a grandfather named Moses. And another, Abraham." He mentions several times the issue of circumcision, "that singular and immemorial archive called circumcision", adding that "this is not just any example for me". And he confesses that in addressing a colleague on the issue of Freud and Judaism, "I am speaking of myself."
There are other themes addressed in the text: the issue of ghosts, addressed at length in Specters of Marx but that Derrida revisits by noting that Freud also "had his ghosts"; the link between history and psychoanalysis, or between psychoanalysis and any discipline, as no discipline can escape, deny or repress the "Freudian impression". We even learn in passing that Derrida was the proud owner of a portable Macintosh computer. And of course, there is the style, the inimitable verb of Derrida, which is beautifully rendered by the translator. This short volume is a worthwhile addition to the Derridean corpus.Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Religion and Postmodernism Series) OverviewIn Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology—fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling."Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."—The Guardian"[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."—Choice"Beautifully written and clear."—Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review"Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."—Library Journal

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