This book presents an innovative format for poetry criticism that its authors call "dialogical poetics." This approach shows that readings of poems, which in academic literary criticism often look like a product of settled knowledge, are in reality a continual negotiation between readers. But Derek [...]
What is distinctive about the cultural practice called 'literature'? How does it benefit individuals and society? How do literary works retain their importance and their capacity to give pleasure over decades and centuries? What constitutes responsible criticism? These are some of the questions addr[...]
This book provides extensive evidence of the importance of close attention to the moving and sounding of language in the poems we take pleasure in. It investigates the ways in which poets have exploited the resources of the language as a spoken medium to write verse that continues to move and delig[...]
Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee is one of the most widely taught contemporary writers, but also one of the most elusive. Many critics who have addressed his work have devoted themselves to rendering it more accessible and acceptable, often playing down the features that discomfort and per[...]
This text communicates a user-friendly way to explore the rhythms of poetry in English. Side-stepping the jargon that often runs through discussions of meter, the authors begin with the basic idea of poetry as a performance and suggest a fresh approach to reading poetic texts.[...]
What is literature? What is the quality in a text that leads a reader to call it 'literary'? What is the 'certain way' of reading that calls into being the literary potential of a text? Why have we been unable to definitively answer these questions, and where does that leave us? Derek Attridge argue[...]
This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Joyce contains several revised essays, reflecting increasing emphasis on Joyce's politics, a fresh sense of the importance of his engagement with Ireland, and the changes wrought by gender studies on criticism of his work. This Companion gathers an i[...]
Deconstruction's Traces.
This volume of conversation not only provides a succinct philosophical biography that highlights the wide range of Attridge's interests. It likewise foregrounds his energetic engagements with literary theory, poetics, and stylistics, as well as his reassessments of contemporary philosophy and litera[...]
James Joyce is known most widely as a "difficult" writer, even if he is no longer thought of as a "dirty" one. Yet many readers - and not just in colleges and universities - have discovered his books to be funny, moving, illuminating, and packed with memorable moments. There are some simple ways to [...]