Essential literary criticism books

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essential

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Funny. I was going to post this but Yea Forums through the years has been entirely unreceptive. In a word: fantastic.
Also all Bachelard's books on poetic imagery. There's more than a few.

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Demetrius and Longinus as well, then.

Essential

You need to exceed the limits of the Saussurean sign to properly grapple with structuralism and post-structuralism. Be cautious about moving on to Eco and primary Peirce, it's easy to get in over your head.

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op here, thanks for replies.
I'm terrible at Photoshop. Can anyone make a nice chart after we have like 30 books?

Saussure's General Course on Linguistics
Barthes' The Pleasures of the Text
Derrida's Writing and Difference

Rabelais and his world is good by Bakhtin

Forgot pic

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Thanks for the reminding me I failed that stupid class because I didn't read this shit.

bump

Lukacs does not get enough respect these days

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The Anxiety of Influence, Western Canon

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IIRC, Longinus said Homer had no merit, he just sounded pretty.

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This please.

It's not that Homer just sounds pretty, but that one often hears the sounds of the actions he describes in the words he uses to describe them with, perhaps miraculously. Homer doesn't require 'merit' because he's Homer, and that's more than enough.
But really On the Sublime (literally high ideas, or lemmas) is a foundational text of W. criticism whatever Longinus has to say about Homer.

Plus it's short, like Poetics.

his fault for selling out to disney

I took a lit crit class. Here’s the reading list.

Plato, The Republic, Book X
Aristotle, The Poetics
Longinus, On the Sublime
Horace, Ars Poetica
Dante Alighieri, Letter to Can Grande della Scalla
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry
John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (excerpt from the section on aesthetics)
William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Matthew Arnold, The Study of Poetry
Henry James, The Art of Fiction
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?
Sigmund Freud, The Theme of the Three Caskets
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

>tfw I'll never learn to Greek or appreciate Homer properly
I honestly didn't care much for the Odyssey, and there were only certain parts of the Iliad I genuinely loved. Sucks being a brainlet monoglot, but at least I've got Shakespeare.

>Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
I really loved this one. I know it was targeted toward upperclass women, but as a blue-collar worker with no college degree I couldn't help relating.

It has its downside, user. It tends to make one unhappy with all modern languages (they're far more limited syntactically AS IF BY DESIGN to keep the people down or something-- I don't believe in Greek genius, but I do believe in the genius of the Greek language: great ideas just flew out of it) and therefore feel even more alone in the world than one did before one started. Shakespeare however can serve as a kind of antidote, I'd guess- have him, and youre no brainlet. Just a feel, but (you) don't strike me as at all wanting. Maybe over modest, but that's not a bad quality.

Everything by Jameson

Lol

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Essential for literary theory is Russian Formalism and the american New Criticism. This entails:
Viktor Skhlovsky: Theory of Prose, Art as Technique
Roman Jacobson: Linguistics and Poetics
Boris Eichenbaum: Theory of the formalist Method
Then:
William K. Wimsatt, Monroe Breadsley: The intentional Fallacy
Cleanth Brooks: The Well Wrought Urn
William Empson: Seven Types of Ambiguity

Also must reads:
Wellek and Warren: Theory of Literature
Wolfgang Kayser: Das Sprachliche Kunstwerk (I'm not aware of any english translation)
There's more, but I can't remember now.

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bump
anybody making a chart?

bump,
don't let it die, until we have a chart

Clearly a major problem with lit crit dudes is that they don't make charts. This is a pretty good thread but spotty. What's essential could be debated endlessly. St. Beuve and the Schlegel brothers would have to be included- but what titles?

What's the best anti-SJW type criticism?

I have this on my shelf and planned on reading this soon. Has anybody read it and liked it?

Literally ALL the foundation texts of lit crit, which focus on either the imagination or on literature. idpol SJW crap as applied to literature is just a pallid species of egotism run amok.
t. not at all politically right here, either

Well since the problem with SJW's is that they have read next to nothing and fill their mind with social media garbage, pretty much every book by a respectable (actually respectable, Eagleton doesn't count) scholar does the deal, especially historians, even marxists like Hobsbawm, and especially Marx, Lenin etc. etc.

another essential one.

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hey, instead of just dumping texts, why don't you guys give a little support to your choices
what makes these works unique and worth consideration

High IQ suggestion.

you're retard if you don't recognise some works and their importance in this thread

Yea Forums isn't for spoonfeeding faggot

>Yea Forums is for the discussion of literature, specifically books (fiction & non-fiction), short stories, poetry, creative writing, etc.
>Please take the time to read what others have written, and try to make thoughtful, well-written posts of your own.

Jameson’s project is so huge, there is no other critic like him.

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Where to start then?

I’d say Postmodernism. But it depends on what you are interested in.

His big project is called The Poetics of Social Form, in which he’s trying to give a general history of literary forms and their relationship to social and economic realities. It encompasses I think five main volumes so far and a bunch of side volumes.
Postmodernism is the first book in the series.

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No, he is right. A short description would be appreciated

It's an amazing book. You'll get the most out of it if you're familiar with the works it references though.

>The Poetics of Social Form
Can't seem to find this anywhere, could you provide a source?

Thanks, user. I've often thought of reading him but never have. With the number of Versos I've capped (about 25) that's inexcusable. Thanks.

>number of Versos I've capped (about 25)

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I don’t know how formal a thing it is, but he mentions it in one of his recent books and it’s mentioned in this article
holbergprisen.no/en/fredric-r-jameson/about-fredric-r-jameson.html

It seems more like an effort by him to systematize and organize his body of work, rather than publishing at together new things.

As far as I can tell the structure is this;

1. Postmodernism
2. Archaeologies of the Future (about science fiction, and utopian themes in literature)
3. The Modernist Papers
3b. A Singular Modernity
4. The Antimonies of Realism
5. Allegory and Ideology

‘Poetics of Social Form’ is mentioned at the end of the introduction of Postmodenism, but with no details on what the structure of the whole project actual is.

you sound like one of those dudes who make diy experiments to prove what they already certain of, that the earth is flat...

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wow

Bumping a great thread with that other thread's book

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who the fuck is this idiot butterfly person?

i see them post in random threads--it's the most innocuous shit, totally useless

is this a running meme? is a single person? what is the source of this constant river of semi-anonymous shit?

Just filter the the tripfag and move on

English is a godly language, dawg. Especially in the hands of the poor

Heh. Look at the newfag.
You don't like literary criticism, you don't have to post ITT.

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yeah but that's the thing: you didn't post anything of any substance. you don't seem to ever post anything of any substance.

are you one person? what's your aim on this board?

"The Rape of the Masters." It's for Art History but the same points work for lit.

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heard that
power..

That cover is very aesthetic. Should I read this even though I haven't read any Calvino?

This whole collection is basically required reading. Narratalogy has been trendy for at least a century a now, I know it was when I studied, maybe its influence is waning now. Still, Bakhtin will probably always enjoy a mediate influence in postmodern theory, in Kristeva specifically.
For anyone interested, see Gasparov's 'On Bakhtin, Philosophy, and Philology: Two Essays' (PMLA 130.1 (2015)) for a criticism of his Bakhtin's philological foundation. In connection with Kristeva and noting , see Benveniste's refutation of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign, not sure of the English title of the essay, something like 'On the nature of the linguistic sign'. Benveniste is especially relevant because of the wholly uncritical reception of his 'work' in literary theory, work being put in quotation marks what you're usually dealing with is Saussure as collected and edited by his students.

in quotation marks because*
but you get the point

Is it genuinely worth the trouble reading beyond Postmodernism etc.? Genuine question, too. I've no beef at all with Marxist criticism, but I got the feeling that aside from the historical overview there wasn't much to take away from Jameson that you couldn't learn from Delillo novel.

i cant wait to read this it looks based

this

bump for chart

What's this?

Reading Sherlock Holmes and Poe through CS Peirce's semiotics

bump

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All trash.

>The Antinomies of Realism is a history ofthe nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day.
>are in the most profound sense inimitable

Why he thinks that realism is now inimitable?

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The historical moment and its significance has already passed. Writing "realist" today is like emulating fashion from the 80's, it won't be anything but a dead, reproducible style for the sake of consumption.

>falling for the historicism meme

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That seems more like a theory that a critic is proud to have created than an actual fact. It’s like the product of a person who is clearly smart, but who can’t work in the sciences neither create art, so he/she invests in the humanities. To present material and become important the said person comes up with theories that exist only because the critic wants to feel productive/important/creative/meaningful.

you say this having not only not read the book, but after reading an incomplete description of one part of a complex argument from a second-hand source.

I don’t care for books of criticism that don’t help one to understand the style of a particular writer or to know how some tools of fiction work. Theories of story or theories of literature are irrelevant to me. What matters are the works, the details on them, and how they were created. I dispise people like Derrida, Saussure, Foucalt and Barthes. I would like to read Nabokov's opinion on them.

Also, I don’t think that anything can be deemed as irrelevant or bad as art or an impossibility just because of its style being “out of fashion” or “not connected to the spirit of the age”. Anyone that writes something like Anna Karenina today will be a far greater artist than DFW or Pynchon. Someone who can write plays like Shakespeare will be better than any poet working today.

Then there is the fact that novels on a realistic style still sell and are admired and read by the public. So they are not only not “an impossibility”, but are also lauded by the reading public.

'realism' as an art 'movement' is not just an attempt to represent 'reality' as accurate or 'realistically' as possible. it is characterized, rather, by an interest in the social conditions and psychologies of 'normal people'--the peasantry, the working class, and the petit bourgeois. it's emergence in the latter part of the 19th century was coeval with the new discipline of sociology. there is a certain style that follows from this scientific interest--detached, impersonal, shrewd, and 'objective', even while carefully detailing complex emotional realities. this style is not genuinely 'inimitable' because the historical moment that made this style of writing fresh and interesting and also 'readable' has passed. that's what jameson is saying.

the point, again, is not that you *can't* imitate this style of writing. rather, if you were to, it could only come off as contrived or, at best, lazy pastiche.

>100 replies
>not one mention of Paul Fry's Literary Criticism course on the Yale Opencourseware website

Good place to start

>it could only come off as contrived or, at best, lazy pastiche.

nah

Anyone who can do what the best writers of all time did in his own particular way is also a great writer.

give me an example

Working today? Alice Munro. She is basically doing what Chekhov did and she is a great artist.

If someone could do what Shakespeare did but with modern vocabullary and contemporary plots I would name this person one of the greatest writers of all time.

bring up some passages. what are the similarities? what was chekhov 'doing' in the first place?
okay. what was shakespeare doing?

>I would like to read Nabokov’s opinion on them.
This has to be bait

strange how opinionated people clam up when you ask after specifics

>ask after

the specifics are the object of my concern
i worry over them, and so i ask after them, rather than for them

ESL trash

It would be funny as hell, that’s why.

>Auerbach, who was Jewish and born in Berlin, was trained in the German philological tradition and would eventually become, along with Leo Spitzer, one of its best-known scholars

what are some books like Auerbach's Mimesis?

bump

there's this one as well

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bump