Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
|
Buy Now
Situated Utterances - Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (Hardcover, Parental Adviso)
Loot Price: R2,896
Discovery Miles 28 960
|
|
Situated Utterances - Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (Hardcover, Parental Adviso)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
Berger describes himself as "a reconstructed old New Critic," and
his publications over the past fifty years have centered on
investigations of the ways in which texts represent both themselves
and their situations of utterance. The thirteen chapters of the
present book illustrate the range of his inquiry across several
cultures and disciplines. They also demonstrate the interpretive
richness, the theoretical acumen, and the energetic prose that
characterize the work of one of America's premier "close readers."
Situated Utterances is divided into four parts. In Part One Berger
designs an analytical model of New Criticism and shows how it was
dismantled during the decades after the Second World War. He then
proposes a reconstructed model in which the practice of ironic and
suspicious "close reading" may be directed toward interactions
among bodies, texts, and countertexts in different cultural
settings. Part Two demonstrates this practice in studies of
specific works in three genres: the pastoral Idylls of Theocritus,
Edmund Spenser's epic, The Faerie Queene, and the Diaries of Samuel
Pepys. The scope of the practice is broadened in Part Three to the
connection between cultural representations and institutional
change, a connection explored in four chapters that successively
examine precapitalist forms of representation, the Old Testament,
Beowulf, and the conflict between nakedness and nudity in Christian
conceptions of the body. Part Four consists in three chapters on
Plato's dialogues, which Berger interprets as critical of the
general situation of utterance in a predominantly oral culture. He
argues that Plato uses the resources of writing to depict the
heroic pathos of a Socrates whose method and message are defeated
by the politics of the oral medium. Situated Utterances concludes
with "A Conspectus of Critical Moves: The Eleven-Step Program."
This is a summary account of the interpretive strategies put into
play by the author throughout his long career.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.