Modernist Quartet is a study of the four major American modernist poets (Frost, Stevens, Pound, Eliot) in various historical environments (literary, philosophical, gender relations, the business of capitalist economics) with special attention given to their central poetic texts as they both reflect and shape our understanding of those environments. Frank Lentricchia presents the poems as stories, sometimes only implicit, of the poets seeking to sustain a life in non-commercial writing, in a culture that is hospitable only (for the most part) to commercial art. Central chapters give a synoptic vision of the lives and literary careers of the four poets in question.

In the introduction to this volume, Frank Lentricchia provides an overview of the critical reception of the novel and examines in its context other works by Don DeLillo. The other essays in the volume discuss DeLillo's view of family and divorce, Hitler's role in the 20th century, technology as a mortal threat, and postmodern America. This collection offers suggestive means by which to approach DeLillo's important contemporary work.

Modernist Quartet is a study of the four major American modernist poets (Frost, Stevens, Pound, Eliot) in various historical environments (literary, philosophical, gender relations, the business of capitalist economics) with special attention given to their central poetic texts as they both reflect and shape our understanding of those environments. Frank Lentricchia presents the poems as stories, sometimes only implicit, of the poets seeking to sustain a life in non-commercial writing, in a culture that is hospitable only (for the most part) to commercial art. Central chapters give a synoptic vision of the lives and literary careers of the four poets in question.

In the introduction to this volume, Frank Lentricchia provides an overview of the critical reception of the novel and examines in its context other works by Don DeLillo. The other essays in the volume discuss DeLillo's view of family and divorce, Hitler's role in the 20th century, technology as a mortal threat, and postmodern America. This collection offers suggestive means by which to approach DeLillo's important contemporary work.

Since its publication in 1990, "Critical Terms for Literary Study" has become a landmark introduction to the work of literary theory--giving tens of thousands of students an unparalleled encounter with what it means to do theory and criticism. Significantly expanded, this new edition features six new chapters that confront, in different ways, the growing understanding of literary works as cultural practices.
These six new chapters are "Popular Culture," "Diversity," "Imperialism/Nationalism," "Desire," "Ethics," and "Class," by John Fiske, Louis Menand, Seamus Deane, Judith Butler, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, and Daniel T. O'Hara, respectively. Each new essay adopts the approach that has won this book such widespread acclaim: each provides a concise history of a literary term, critically explores the issues and questions the term raises, and then puts theory into practice by showing the reading strategies the term permits.
Exploring the concepts that shape the way we read, the essays combine to provide an extraordinary introduction to the work of literature and literary study, as the nation's most distinguished scholars put the tools of critical practice vividly to use.

Fiction. THE PORTABLE LENTRICCHIA is an ideal entrance into the fictional world of the novelist described as "the greatest unknown writer in America." This thrilling selection of Frank Lentricchia's fiction--from his debut Johnny Critelli to the forthcoming The Accidental Pallbearer--showcases much of his best work, underlining the themes that have preoccupied him and offering readers an astonishing range of set pieces filled with surging lyricism, abrupt violence, and outrageous humor.

Lucchesi and The Whale is an unusual work of fiction by noted author and critic Frank Lentricchia. Its central character, Thomas Lucchesi Jr., is a college professor in the American heartland whose obsessions and compulsions include traveling to visit friends in their last moments of life-because grief alone inspires him to write-and searching for secret meaning in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Himself a writer of "stories full of violence in a poetic style," Lucchesi tells his students that he teaches "only because [his] fiction is commercially untouchable" and to "never forget that." Austerely isolated, anxiety-ridden, and relentlessly self-involved, Lucchesi nonetheless cannot completely squelch his eagerness for love. Having become "a mad Ahab of reading," who is driven to dissect the "artificial body of Melville's behemothian book" to grasp its truth, Lucchesi allows his thoughts to wander and loop from theory to dream to reality to questionable memory. But his black humor-tinged musings are often as profoundly moving as they are intellectual, such as the section in which he ponders the life and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein in relation to the significance of a name-and then attempts to share these thoughts with a sexy, middle-aged flight attendant-or another in which he describes a chance meeting with a similarly-named mafia don. Despite apparent spiritual emptiness, Lucchesi in the end does find "a secret meaning" to Moby-Dick. And Lentricchia's creations-both Lucchesi and The Whale and its main character-reveal this meaning through a series of ingeniously self-reflective metaphors, in much the way that Melville himself did in and through Moby-Dick. Vivid, humorous, and of unparalleled originality, this new work from Frank Lentricchia will inspire and console all who love and ponder both great literature and those who would write it.

An anthology of exemplary readings by some of the twentieth century's foremost literary critics, "Close Reading" presents a wide range of responses to the question at the heart of literary criticism: how best to read a text to understand its meaning. The lively introduction and the selected essays provide an overview of close reading from New Criticism through poststructuralism, including works of feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, new historicism, and more.

From a 1938 essay by John Crowe Ransom through the work of contemporary scholars, "Close Reading" highlights the interplay between critics--the ways they respond to and are influenced by others' works. To facilitate comparisons of methodology, the collection includes discussions of the same primary texts by scholars using different critical approaches. The essays focus on "Hamlet," "Lycidas," "The Rape of the Lock," "Ulysses, Invisible Man, Beloved, "Jane Austen, John Keats, and Wallace Stevens and reveal not only what the contributors are reading, but also "how" they are reading.

Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois's collection is an essential tool for teaching the history and practice of close reading.

"Contributors." Houston A. Baker Jr., Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Andrew DuBois, Stanley Fish, Catherine Gallagher, Sandra Gilbert, Stephen Greenblatt, Susan Gubar, Fredric Jameson, Murray Krieger, Frank Lentricchia, Franco Moretti, John Crowe Ransom, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Helen Vendler

If you want to find out what a rock critic, a syndicated columnist, and scholars of American literature have to say about one of America's most important contemporary novelists, turn to Introducing Don DeLillo. Placing the author's work in a cultural context, this is the first book-length collection on DeLillo, adding considerably to the emerging critical discourse on his work. Diversity is the key to this striking assemblage of cultural criticism edited by Frank Lentricchia. Special features include an expanded version of the Rolling Stone interview with the author ("An Outsider in this Society") and the extraordinary tenth chapter of DeLillo's Ratner's Star. Accessibly written and entertaining, the collection will be of great interest to both students and scholars of contemporary American literature as well as to general readers interested in DeLillo's work.Contributors. Frank Lentricchia, Anthony Decurtis, Daniel Aaron, Hal Crowther, John A. McClure, Eugene Goodheart, Charles Molesworth, Dennis A. Foster, and John Frow

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.  

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.  

This work is the first history and evaluation of contemporary American critical theory within its European philosophical contexts. In the first part, Frank Lentricchia analyzes the impact on our critical thought of Frye, Stevens, Kermode, Sartre, Poulet, Heidegger, Sussure, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault, among other, less central figures. In a second part, Lentricchia turns to four exemplary theorists on the American scene--Murray Krieger, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom--and an analysis of their careers within the lineage established in part one.
Lentricchia's critical intention is in evidence in his sustained attack on the more or less hidden formalist premises inherited from the New Critical fathers. Even in the name of historical consciousness, he contends, contemporary theorists have often cut literature off from social and temporal processes. By so doing he believes that they have deprived literature of its relevant values and turned the teaching of both literature and theory into a rarefied activity. All along the way, with the help of such diverse thinkers as Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Bloom, Lentricchia indicates a strategy by which future critical theorists may resist the mandarin attitudes of their fathers.