San Antonio College Library

Calling Samuel Johnson the greatest literary critic since Aristotle, Richard B. Schwartz assumes the perspective of that quintessential eighteenth-century man of letters to examine the critical and theoretical literary developments that gained momentum in the 1970s and stimulated the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Schwartz speculates that Johnson - who revered hard facts, a wide cultural base, and common sense - would have exhibited scant patience...

This is a broad interdisciplinary and comparative study of the ways in which we discursively 'make' the world and its things. The author goes beyond the 'poetic thinking' of Heidegger toward a more pragmatic way of interpreting concrete social, cultural, and political experience. The author outlines three constitutive functions of world-making. Endowing signifies the direct provision of the 'wherewithal' that must come into being if anything else...

Not too long ago, literary theorists were writing about the death of the novel and the death of the author; today many are talking about the death of Theory. Theory, as the many theoretical ism's (among them postcolonialism, postmodernism, and New Historicism) are now known, once seemed so exciting but has become ossified and insular. This iconoclastic collection is an excellent companion to current anthologies of literary theory, which have embraced...

A university English professor delves into literature, criticism, and philosophy as he explores the nature of beginnings.

Provides both an introduction and a cross-section of the field, proposing why one should, and how one might, study the literature of war. Contributors offer samplings from the vast body of war-related literature and film, from the Iliad and Shakespeare to documentary films about the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan in the first decade of the 21st century. --From publisher description.

Offers advice to people on how to talk about books they have not read, including books they have skimmed, heard about, or read and forgotten, analyzes situations in which people might find themselves talking about books they have not read, and includes recommendations on how to resolve such social dilemmas.