A sine qua non of literary criticism
923552
I first learned of this delightful little work as a college freshman.  My professor, a remarkably learned fellow with a tremendous knowledge of American literature, would occasionally reference it with amused  appreciation.  In our discussion of the Last of the Mohicans, I can still  recall his enjoyment in recounting Lawrence's description of Cooper,  sitting in a hotel room in a European city, with his gentleman's finery,  surrounded by all of the trappings of a genteel aristocrat, living a sort  of Walter Mitty life through his virtual antithesis -- Natty Bumpo, the  protagonist of the Leatherstocking tales.  To this day, I am amazed  whenever I read this little tome, since Lawrence captures, in a few short  essays, the essence of such authors as Franklin, Whitman, Cooper, and  Melville.  His style, so cheeky and incisive, is a joy to read.  Lawrence  had an astonishing grasp of what it is that makes American literature so  fundamentally different from that which was composed by his own countrymen.  He brings a pschoanalytic, Jungian perspective to bear on these great  works, and sees in Natty Bumpo, Ishmael, and other heroes of American  literature the archetypes of our collective American unconscious.  Of  course, this work tells us as much about Lawrence as it does about great  American writers, which is why it makes such great reading.  Lawrence is  well known for being a novelist, but his corpus contains much else besides:  travel literature, criticism, poetry, essays.  This one is highly  recommended.
689950
Please ignore the reviews of people here who haven't read the book, or people with an agenda or people talking about "logical fallacies" without seemingly knowing what that means.

This book is an examination of the sexual practices of a wide variety of species of animals, including humans.  The book concludes that there are significant evolutionary advantages to non-monogamous sexual relationships and there seem to be very clear bodily adaptations that evolved because of this.  These points are just not arguable in good faith.

The book doesn't draw any conclusions about the "naturalness" of monogomy except that it is rare, because that discussion is metaphysics at best; the religious among us use "natural" as a proxy for "our interpretation of gods will" or "how we think society ought to be".  We live in a dangerous age where people are willing to deny the truth as it suits them.  We have a duty as rational beings to accept objective truth no matter how unpalatable.

I think the book is a very good read if you're at all interested in the topic.  I did not however find the writing style very interesting, and I had trouble keeping track of the many many types of animals discussed and their various traits.  I also felt the conclusion was far too apologetic towards current societal beliefs and a bit simple minded.  Nevertheless, a good read if you're interested in the subject.
345081
I give five stars to this book because it is an instance of a philosopher really thinking with a literary work instead of applying his philosophical system on it as some kind of testing instrument of truth, or using the work to illustrate a point or two about his system. Philosophy and Literature converge here on a tangential, but fruitfull encounter.
1225252
[Modified/edited based John Sutherlands reviewon FT.com. Please see http://on.ft.com/1S9FLt9 (registration required. This review applies to both this volume and Vol 2: T.S. Eliot often quipped that the critics had got more from his poem than he, often undertaking over-interpretations of his poems. It's almost as though he felt we would be better off to approach his poems in the spirit of going to a performance of Cats, the musical he inspired, not to "interpret," but to experience and enjoy. Have annotators Christopher Ricks and his assisting co-editor Jim McCue over-done it here with approximately 8 pages of annotations for every page of verse? I suppose would could take that view, but on the whole, I felt their work aided both understanding AND enjoyment. Ricks is a critic whom Eliot would have approved of.  Ricks is able discern  references to other poets, a skill particularly appropriate to Eliot, whose poems often offer a creative allusion to earlier poems by others. Hence Eliot's jest, immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. So are the annotations bringing out so many of these allusions beside the point? The question answers itself -- Kipling, George Eliot, Laforgue, Gautier, Pound, James and Thomson among many others constitute an older poets society that Eliot would have living poets should join. Thus, the two volumes of this set are a monument to both TS Eliot, and to what literary criticism, at its best, can do for our appreciation of great literature.
1625285
I bought this book for a literary criticism class and it fit the bill well. This book is not really about literary theory like the title may suggest, but rather it gives different types of viewpoints for criticism of literature. Some include Feminist, formalist, reader response, etc.  It doesn't talk about the relationships between an author creating a text, what literature is, etc. that is more of the theory part. So if you want to know the generalized types of criticism that professors expect English majors to be able to point at and name, go for it. It's not going to teach you how to think about it abstractly.
2354582
If you want "great literature" to be "interpreted" for you ("Let's see, which of my five Great Truths does this one check off the list?") you should indeed look elsewhere (and maybe start by reading titles). If, on the other hand, you are like me interested in a readable, lively discussion of the way modernists such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and H. D. responded to changes in the literary marketplace and made their reputations by clever use (or sometimes failure to make use) of little reviews, prizes, and limited "investment" editions of their works, read on. Rainey's book, by now a classic of the new modernist studies, is lively (with pictures even!), funny (the story of Pound scrambling to compete with Marinetti's sellout talks in London, for instance), and paradigm-shifting. If you wish to persist in believing that Great Literature drops from the heavens like manna and is but to be lapped up with reverence, well, sorry--but the silly animus evidenced in most of these soi-disant reviews smacks of the disgruntled undergrad who didn't get an A. (Or even a B, probably.)
2536260
Walter Rea's book, The White Lie, calls attention to striking parallels between certain passages in Ellen White's literary works and the works of other authors. These similarities may catch the reader off guard if he or she is not aware of how widely Mrs. White read in preparing for her writing. Though the book may be helpful to those studying the literary development of Mrs. White's writing, as Mr. Rea unwittingly admits himself, the evidence it presents is "inconclusive" and "grossly exaggerated" (pp. 89, 95). The book fails to reckon with the conceptual undergirding of Mrs. White's earlier literature in evaluating parallels in her later writing. It also calls attention to examples of parallels that are so unremarkable that the thoughtful reader may conclude that Mrs. White has merely covered the same literary ground as the supposed given source.

The cynical grin of the mask on the book's cover reflects the tone of the book throughout. The "critical analysis" of the book (often more "critical" than "analysis") is an attack, not only on Ellen White's integrity as a writer, but on organized religion as a whole. It will doubtless be well-received by those who wish to dismiss Ellen White or the Seventh-day Adventist Church she helped to found.
984275
James Wood's book is largely an engaging read filled with pleasing sentences and often telling illustration. It deals principally with writerly skills, and those particular uses of them which make in novels for the Beautiful. Among the most important of these is the indirect or ironic narrative style whose virtues Wood demonstrates in detail. The author in similar fashion moves on to treat with equivalent freshness such expected areas as characterization and language. Then, toward the end of the book, he turns to the question of the True in novels, and persuasively argues for what he calls "lifeness." Such concerns of Beauty and Truth are of obvious centrality to both the creative writer and the appreciative reader of novels. So far, I'd argue, so good.

 The book finally and sadly disappoints, however, and it does so owing to the author's inadequate and stale, if still widely fashionable view of what in novels constitutes the third element in Plato's trinity, the Good. About the freshest Wood gets in his noticeably scant treatment of this topic is a twice repeated quotation from George Eliot on how novel reading can expand our sympathies, enlarge our human capacities and horizons. Surely this is true as far as it goes, but Wood implies much more here which he doesn't seem to realize is highly questionable. If I read him rightly, he is praising readers of novels who leave Plato's Cave in order just to become "non-judgmental" multiculturalists, open to all times, places, and persons. And this assumption, held apparently with uncritical dogmatism, is as far as Wood goes in considering the Good.

 Wood's thinking, despite his own early voiced Joycean fear of pedantry, finally itself smells too much of the shop. He values the difficulty of the doing almost to the exclusion of the human worth of the thing done. His enthusiasm, for example, for the artistry in a particularly gross passage from Philip Roth coupled with an ignoring of any deeper moral considerations may stand as the signature of Wood's strengths and weaknesses as a critic. What he omits in bowing before the artistry of any skillful wielder of words is what Flannery O'Connor included when she quipped that for Tolstoy in "Anna Karenina" adultery was a sin whereas for rootless postmodern fiction writers, critics, and readers it is at most "an inconvenience."

Flannery O'Connor, by the way, whose own brilliant book of criticism "Mystery and Manners" Wood oddly neglects, shared with Plato and Tolstoy the belief that art was so powerful a force, it could be dangerous, to the artist and to society. On the other hand, PBS a few years ago inadvertently revealed its cruder idea that art in our time had at last been defanged and was instead now happily insipid, the station even going so far as to offer subscribers a self-congratulatory button sporting the phrase "Fear No Art." In his inadequate handling of the "Good" in the art of the novel, James Wood for all his sophistication places himself, I'm afraid, on PBS' side of the court.
3180030
Despite what others describe as a flawed translation, this text represents a brilliant, nuanced and complex presentation of negative dialectics. The differen e between American and European cultural, political and psychological theoretical critique is evident in this book.
1125415
.
Walter Jackson Bate is famous for his biography of Johnson, but 20 years earlier he wrote this gem, which collects the major themes in Johnson's essays, and ties together the points Johnson made on them. It is not a quotation collection, it is Bate's analysis of the themes. There is a biographical chapter, but then about 150 pages of analysis. Those chapters are called:
1.  The hunger of imagination
2.  The treachery of the human heart and the strategems of defense
3.  The stability of truth
4.  Johnson as a critic: the form and function of literature
This is a great companion volume for readers of Johnson's essays and criticism.
457963
It's tempting to say that a book with the title "Why Trilling Matters" is likely to appeal to those to whom Trilling ALREADY matters, but leaving that aside (for there's nothing that Kirsch can do about that!), this is a fine, thought-provoking book that gets behind Trilling's professional, rather mandarin, facade (as exemplified by the canonical essays) to reveal a writer who is fully aware of the kinds of "instinctual renunciation" (Freud's phrase, cited by Trilling) that are involved in the creative process, as an artist works from anarchic energies into forms that bespeak the power of these energies even as they, to some extent, contain them.  And Trilling is also aware that readers and critics, as they manipulate these creations into cultural objects, especially via the academic establishment, are to some extent domesticating forces that are anarchic and sometimes inimical to civilization and "culture."  In other words, Kirsch puts Trilling in the tradition of Nietzsche and the Freud of "Civilization and its Discontents."  Is he persuasive?  I would say that he is -- by bringing to our attention some of Trilling's political commitments and literary journalism in the 1930's, his attraction to the violence in Babel's stories, and his conflicted dealings with his student Allen Ginsberg, Kirsch convinces us of this strain in Trilling's thinking -- a strain that makes him responsive to modernist writers whom he reads avidly but doesn't much write about.  Trilling is in no doubt of the need for what I've called "domestication" of the energies that lie behind modernist art, but he also does not want his readers (or the responders to modernist art) to fail to be alive to the power of the energies thus manifested.  The recognition and exercise of these energies are what make us "souls" (in Keats's sense, in his "Vale of Soul-Making" letter) or "selves."  Kirsch is eloquent about, and sees Trilling as perspicuous about, the threat to the "self' or "soul" posed by a culture in which art becomes merely a matter of taste (or "erotics" in Sontag's phrase), and that is the culture that we live in and that Trilling foresaw as early as the early 1970's.  Kirsch's final bringing together of late Sontag (in the 1990's) and late Trilling (20 years earlier) is a brilliant and sobering insight, and it makes clear why for him Trilling still matters.  So, this book is well worth reading -- the fine critic Morris Dickstein is quoted on the back cover as calling this the best book on Trilling.  He might be right -- but it's not as if there are ALL that many!
1311203
Author uses contradinting sources and says that because they contradict there is no god.  These sources don't have to agree to mean that any one of them is true, only if they were all true would the sources have to agree.
855628
Nancy K. Miller is best known for The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782, which is clearly not a book that passes unperceived (to paraphrase Peter Brooks of Yale).  Here Miller takes on the role of women in a much larger timeline (roughly from the Renaissance through the 19th century), again with her unsentimental criticism.  Her style is terse, often funny, and readable. After a thorough linear analysis of a narrative sequence, she discusses the ideological consequence of the novel.  Because she doesn't have an axe to grind, her critiques cannot be dismissed as "feminist" but rather bring added depth to the study of the novel.
4603382
Looking at the reviews of this book, you wonder whether people are talking about the same book. Some call it excellent, others a complete load of nonsense. I can see why people might complain. They might say that you need  to read Proust and not read a guide on Proust. But that misses out what  this book is really about. It's not attempting to be a "guide";  It's certainly not attempting to replace Proust. It's just looking at a  certain side of Proust's thought; what one might call his therapeutic side,  and tracing it very skillfully through the letters and the biography and  the novel. It reads unbelievably clearly - and so, if one's feeling  ungenerous, it might be accused of being "simplistic," but that's  naive. This kind of clarity and lucidity requires an enormous effort and  huge talent. Alain de Botton's work is uneven. The Romantic Movement didn't  really work, Kiss & Tell was Ok but only OK, but he triumphed in two  books; On Love and now this title. I can only urge serious readers to take  a look at this book. This is a book that matters. It's going to go down in  history as one of the finest, most intelligent pieces of literary criticism  of the 20th century.
3964388
I've only written one other Amazon review, but I thought that the 1 star rating was grossly unjust, so here I go!

Mullan introduces literary criticism by actually analysing various new and classic novels. He never `talks down' to the reader, but he also assumes you have no background in literary criticism (i.e.-me!). I feel like I learned as much from reading this book as I would have from an intro college class.

The book is arranged by theme. The chapters are: beginning, narrating, people, genre, voices, structure, detail, style, devices, literariness, and ending. That pretty much sums up what you're going to learn about.  Mullan has a nice, structured style: the beginning of every chapter summarises his points and outlines what books we're going to look at and what details we're going to find. He keeps the digs at contemporary authors to a minimum, despite his obvious membership in `literary circles,' which is refreshing. I've probably read about half of the books he analysed (and when I read this, I was a twenty-year-old American who had never taken an English class); for those that I hadn't read, he gives enough background that I don't feel like I'm missing out. He does a pretty good job about avoiding spoilers until the last chapter, which discusses novels' endings. Fortunately, I had read most of the books in this chapter, but there was one part where I had to actually shut my eyes and turn the page so that a novel I've been meaning to read wasn't ruined!

I'm very grateful to Mullan for providing me the tools to analyse the books that I read in a more detailed and organised manner. For anyone out there who is intelligent and curious about literary criticism, but doesn't have any kind of background in it, this book is a godsend. It's also just great to read a book by someone who obviously loves reading and loves fiction. Sometimes, it seems like fiction is still judged as `lesser' than non-fiction; Mulland truly shows its power. Highly, highly recommended.

I'll end with one of my favourite quotes from the book: "The Novel is a genre that would have us believe that its characters might have a life beyond its pages."
3316908
That is the headline of a fictitious book review in The New York Times about a novel the protagonist writes, in which the author effectively provides a review his own book:

 Russell J. Marks IIIa pseudonym for a freshman authorhas penned a short novel designed to challenge your faith. The novel opens with the incongruous scene of a business-school professor receiving a message from God on his iPod. With the support of his wife and a host of sounding boards, the protagonist explores the origins and beliefs of the core Abrahamic religions as well as Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Mormonism with a decidedly antidoctrinaire interpretation of each.  But don't assume the dogma-bashing stops there. More importantly, the book challenges the assumptions of the scientific community, highlighting provocative gaps in our knowledge of the ultimate question of the origins of the universe and the egoistic species called Homo sapiens.

Though the character development and flow of the book reflect an obviously untrained hand, the ideas presented carry the reader away despite the lack of sophistication of the author. The book fares poorly as a work of literary fiction but exceeds all expectations as an incendiary attack on conventional wisdomregardless of your personal convictions. Read it for the surprising claims about quantum physics, religion, cosmology, and even extraterrestrialsall of which passed the test of our best fact-checkers. Read it for the ideas.

What can you say about an author who not only writes a thought-provoking, engaging novel, but even writes his own book review!

In writing this book as a novel, the author succeeds in making a potentially polarizing and dry topic into an accessible story about one mans quest to dispel the notion that science and faith must be mutually exclusive. Wherever you fall on the science vs. faith spectrum, and whether you agree with the authors theories, the book will challenge you to think about your own beliefs and assumptions, and certainly leave you better informed. And for those who want to explore this subject further, the author provides an ample reading list with over 30 titles.

While the author downplays the books merits as a work of fiction, I enjoyed reading the book and found the ending (and premise overall) humorous. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning more about science and religion, or enjoy reading stories that inform and challenge, as well as entertain.
194630
B.R. Myers' A Reader's Manifesto is an extended version of an article first published in The Atlantic Monthly a year ago.  In the original article and through this book, the author attacks the foundation of literary criticism which bestows upon certain authors rave reviews for "serious fiction" when he believes them to just be examples of very bad writing.
Myers offers up five examples of bad writing produced by some of the most critically acclaimed authors of contemporary fiction - Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarty, Paul Auster, and David Gusterson.  He takes these authors to task for long sentences, repetitiveness (a.k.a. shopping-list sytle of writing), overloading on the imagery through metaphors and similies, and nonsensical equivocations on trivial issues.  The point is made through analysis of numerous writings excerpted at length.  The author takes pains to often include excerpts cited by critics as masterworks,
After studying these excerpts and Myers' arguments, I understand and generally agree with his viewpoint.  To potential skeptics, don't misinterpret this book as purely a criticism of style.  The book primarily argues against using style as a novelty for its own sake and champions using it effectively in conveying ideas - an apparently unique concept.