"Filmspeak" is an accessible, innovative book which uses specific examples to show how once arcane literary and cultural theory has infiltrated popular culture. Theory reaches us in ways we do not even realize. Issues such as the nature of knowledge or truth, the function of personal response in interpretation, the nature of the forces of politics, the female alternative to the male view of the world, are fundamental for all of us. And intelligent analysis of the relationship between literary theory and popular culture can help us to understand our fast-changing world.Here, experienced literary scholar and teacher Edward L. Tomarken explains how it is possible to study the rudiments of literary theory by watching and analyzing contemporary mainstream movies - from "The Dark Knight" to "Kill Bill," and from "The Social Network" to "The Devil Wears Prada." Theorists discussed include Foucault, Jameson, Iser, and Cixous. Tomarken brilliantly demonstrates that anyone can grasp modern literary theory by way of mainstream movies without having to wade through stacks of impenetrable jargon.

This essay collection offers a lengthy introduction describing trends in criticism and theatrical interpretation of As You Like It. Twenty-six major essays on the play, including several written especially for this volume highlight the work, coupled with twenty-three reviews of various productions, ranging from 1741 to 1919. Edward Tomarken edited this valuable collection with a contents that includes pieces by Samuel Johnson, Charles Gildon, J. Payne Collier, Denton J. Snider, Charles Wingate, Victor O. Freeburg, J.B. Priestly, Cumberland Clark, Margaret Maurer and others.

Ralph Cohen founded New Literary History in 1969 and remained its editor until 2012, when it was widely seen as one of the major journals of literary theory. Cohen's generic method can help us understand many forms of artistic endeavour, from poetry and fiction to films and television series. In Theory Now, Edward Tomarken, a former student of Ralph Cohen, presents the rudiments of Cohen's method by using popular movies and television programmes to illustrate and explain theory essays of the past twenty years. Avoiding the jargon associated with the discipline, Tomarken uses the language of the general reader. The present book is intended both for undergraduates and for anyone interested in film and television. It combines close analysis of the chosen artistic works with a lifetime's experience of the innovative and ground-breaking insights of Ralph Cohen. The final aim of the study is to show that literary and artistic knowledge is not different from any other form of knowledge and that therefore aesthetic comprehension applies to all aspects of human culture.

A history and analysis of 250 years of critical commentary on selected works of Samuel Johnson. The works of Samuel Johnson, whom many consider the father of English criticism, are themselves the object of thousands of pages of critical commentary and analysis. Edward Tomarken's study traces and analyses the past two and a half centuries of commentary on selected Johnsonian works: The early biographies and the life of Savage (1744); The nondramatic poems, particularly 'London' (1738) and 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' (1749); His play Irene (1749); The periodical essays, particularly in the Rambler (1750-52); Rasselas (1759); Shakespearean criticism (1765); The Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775); and The Lives of the Poets(1779-81).

Edward Tomarken's previous book, Filmspeak, was a study of literary theory in relation to contemporary mainstream films. Some of the abstruse ideas of early literary theorists (1950-70) had in fact permeated our thinking to such an extent that both films and theories enriched and shed light upon one another. One early response to Filmspeak was the question 'Why theory?', a remark that provides the title of this new and exciting exploration of literature. In pursuit of an answer, Tomarken turns to the 'second generation' of critics (1970-2000), and analyses television programmes as well as films. He considers scholars such as Clifford Geertz and Martha Nussbaum who saw themselves as working in the field of cultural studies. Why theory? thus has a dual focus - on both culture and literary theory. The result of integrating cultural ideas with media interpretation sees Tomarken grapple with the question of the title: theory has become a part of our cultural life. -- .

Although Rasselas has received more critical commentary than almost any other work by Samuel Johnson, Edward Tomarken's book is the first full length study to focus on his tale of the Prince of Abyssinia. This anomaly arises, as Tomarken shows, because Rasselas has remained resistant to the customary critical approaches of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, consistently eliciting new kinds of insights and raising new sorts of problems. Tomarken' s contribution is a new methodology to explain this phenomenon. He sees Johnson's early writings, London and Irene, as instances of the writer trying with only partial success to achieve what he first realized in The Vanity of Human Wishes, a means of permitting literary form to refer to conduct. Later works, such as The Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, are viewed as further developments of this method, which achieved its fullest expression in Rasselas and the Life of Pope. Such a reading of Johnson develops an aesthetic that operates on the margins between the literary and the extra-literary. Although Johnson's own critical view was unable to accommodate such a position, Tomarken shows that in practice he moved toward it by a process of trial and error manifest in his poetry and narratives. When raised to the level of critical method, this approach goes beyond the assumptions not only of Johnson's day but also of our own. Tomarken's theoretical coda demonstrates how the choices of current critical theory, like those in the marriage debate in Rasselas, can be understood to interact with one another. Specifically, he proposes a dialectical relationship for two approaches hermeneutics and structuralism-usually seen as opposed to one another. This innovative study will interest not only Johnson scholars but all those concerned with critical theory.

Since the first appearance of Samuel Johnson's edition of Shakespeare's drama in 1765, its Preface has often been published separately, while the Notes have been treated as miscellaneous and fragmentary. As a result, few modern readers realize that the Notes in fact contain coherent interpretations of most of the plays and that many portions of the Preface are generalizations related to those readings. Scholars who have examined the Notes carefully have almost always used them in studies of larger issues, such as Johnson's morality or rhetoric. In this book, Edward Tomarken provides the first full-length study of the Notes to Shakespeare, showing how they raise issues of direct concern to modern critics and theoreticians.

While referring to Johnson's notes on all the Shakespearean dramas, Tomarken focuses on eight plays--Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, The Tempest, Hamlet, and Macbeth--to demonstrate the range of Johnson's editorial and critical abilities. Each chapter, devoted to a single play, moves from the particular to the general-from specific remarks about the play in the Notes, to related theoretical statements in the Preface, and finally to an axiom of literary theory. Ranging from a formulation concerning ideology in criticism to a reconsideration of aesthetic empathy, these axioms are, Tomarken contends, essential to literary criticism as a discipline and manifest Johnson's relevance to modern criticism.

The conception of criticism that emerges in this book goes well beyond the theoretical premises of the eighteenth century. Tomarken submits that the ethical dimension of criticism-the moral aspect so fundamental to Johnson but so foreign to modern critics-can point to a way of mediating between the ideological differences that have become so divisive in modern criticism and theory.