Roland Barthes is a crucial figure in modern literary and cultural theory. His work has been influential in a wide variety of theoretical trends and practices, including structuralism, semiology, post-structuralism, cultural studies and psychoanalytical literary criticism. Barthes is one of a handful of writers who can be said to have established the foundations for modern literary and cultural theory. To understand theory today one must come to know about and engage with his work.
American Theorists of the Novel - Henry James, Lionel Trilling, Wayne C. Booth (Routledge CriticalWhy read James, Trilling, and Booth? The answer may not be immediatelyobvious. Writing from the 1860s and through to the early twentieth century, Henry James (1843–1916) is most widely renowned for works such as The Wings of the Dove (1902b), The Golden Bowl (1904), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and his ghost story, ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898). But he also published ground-breaking prefaces to his own fiction and numerous critical essays. Lionel Trilling (1905–75) became well known as a literary critic in a 1950s academic scene dominated by, as we shall see, the ‘New Criticism’ of earlier decades.
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) continues to be one of the most important figures in critical theory. His theories have been concerned largely with the concepts of power, knowledge and discourse, and his influence is clear in a great deal of post-structuralist, post-modernist, feminist, post-Marxist and post-colonial theorising. The impact of his work has also been felt across a wide range of disciplinary fields, from sociology and anthropology to English studies and history. However, the iconoclastic and challenging nature of Foucault’s
Rather than begin this book with a potted explanation of Antonio Gramsci’s thought, I want you answer the question ‘Why Gramsci?’ yourself, by ‘doing’ some Gramscian analysis, albeit analysis of a cultural form with which Gramsci himself would have been entirely unfamiliar. Take a piece of participato
Why Derrida? In accordance with the ‘similar structure’ (p. ix) of each book in this series, Routledge Critical Thinkers, I must begin by trying to respond to this question – with luck in ways that will interest and even amuse you (since the question, I confess, is not one that I am able to take altogether seriously, for reasons that I hope will become clear). No doubt there will have been some minimal understanding already presupposed here: ‘Derrida’ is not the name of some new high-energy drink or a prospective location for the next Olympic Games.
