Critical Terms for Literary Study

Citation

Lentricchia, F., & McLaughlin, T. (Eds.). (1995). Critical Terms for Literary Study (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is a collection of specially written essays of about 500 pages, each devoted to a single key term of literary study and written by a different scholar. The publisher describes each essay as giving a concise history of its term, a critical exploration of the issues and questions the term raises for the field, and demonstrations of reading strategies driven by the term. An introduction by Thomas McLaughlin opens the volume, and a closing piece by Frank Lentricchia, "In Place of an Afterword: Someone Reading," ends it. Twenty-eight terms are grouped in three parts.

Introduction and Preface to the Second Edition

McLaughlin's introduction frames the collection as a way into the vocabulary through which literary study is conducted. A preface to the second edition precedes it.

Part I: Literature as Writing (Chapters 1–8)

The first part gathers terms that describe what a literary text is and how it is made: Representation (W. J. T. Mitchell), Structure (John Carlos Rowe), Writing (Barbara Johnson), Discourse (Paul A. Bove), Narrative (J. Hillis Miller), Figurative Language (Thomas McLaughlin), Performance (Henry Sayre) and Author (Donald E. Pease). Together they cover the textual side of the field, from how texts depict the world to who is understood to produce them.

Part II: Interpretation (Chapters 9–15)

The second part turns to the activity of reading and judging: Interpretation (Steven Mailloux), Intention (Annabel Patterson), Unconscious (Francoise Meltzer), Determinacy/Indeterminacy (Gerald Graff), Value/Evaluation (Barbara Herrnstein Smith), Influence (Louis A. Renza) and Rhetoric (Stanley Fish). The terms here concern what readers do with texts and the grounds on which they claim to understand or rank them.

Part III: Literature, Culture, Politics (Chapters 16–28)

The longest part places literature in its social setting: Culture (Stephen Greenblatt), Canon (John Guillory), Literary History (Lee Patterson), Gender (Myra Jehlen), Race (Kwame Anthony Appiah), Ethnicity (Werner Sollors), Ideology (James H. Kavanagh), Popular Culture (John Fiske), Diversity (Louis Menand), Imperialism/Nationalism (Seamus Deane), Desire (Judith Butler), Ethics (Geoffrey Galt Harpham) and Class (Daniel T. O'Hara). Of the three parts, this is the one most concerned with the relation of literary study to society and politics.

In Place of an Afterword: Someone Reading

Lentricchia's closing essay returns to the figure of the reader, ending a volume that otherwise proceeds term by term.

Key Concepts

Part I: Literature as Writing

• Representation, structure, writing, discourse: the terms through which a text is described as a made object.
• Narrative and figurative language: the terms for how texts tell and how they speak indirectly.
• Performance and author: the terms for how texts are enacted and attributed.

Part II: Interpretation

• Interpretation and intention: what it means to read a text and whether an author's purpose governs the reading.
• Determinacy/indeterminacy and value/evaluation: whether meaning and worth can be settled.
• Unconscious, influence and rhetoric: factors that shape and complicate a text's meaning and effect.

Part III: Literature, Culture, Politics

• Culture, canon and literary history: the frameworks within which works are grouped and ranked.
• Gender, race, ethnicity and class: categories of social difference as they bear on reading and writing.
• Ideology, imperialism/nationalism and diversity: political and institutional contexts of literary study.
• Desire and ethics: terms through which the personal and the moral enter criticism.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A common essay design. Every essay traces the history of its term, raises the questions it poses and then applies the term to a literary text, according to the publisher. A reader therefore sees theory working on a text in each entry, not only definitions.
• Authors with a stake in their terms. The essays are specially written by well-known critics, so each entry is a critic's own engagement with a term rather than an anonymous definition.
• A structure that supports selective reading. The three-part division and short, self-contained essays let a student read the one or two terms an assignment calls for without reading the whole book.
• Range. The terms run from formal ones such as narrative and figurative language to political ones such as class, race and imperialism, which presents literary study as both a textual and a social practice.

Limitations

• Terms rather than schools. Because the book is organised by term, a reader will not find a single account of a movement such as structuralism or feminism; each appears across several essays.
• A snapshot of its date. The second edition carries a 1995 date, so the list of terms and the debates around them reflect the field of that period; readers will need more recent sources for later developments.
• Essays vary with their authors. Each essay is a distinct scholar's view, so voice, difficulty and the choice of illustrating text differ from entry to entry, and the volume does not offer one uniform method.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the introduction to literary studies list, this is the volume for readers who want to understand the vocabulary of criticism by following its key words. Bennett and Royle's An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is also built from short thematic chapters, each starting from a question about reading, and offers a single-author alternative to a multi-author collection. Rivkin and Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology supplies the primary texts of theory, and this book is a good companion to it, giving a map of the concepts those texts use.

The other books in the list are anthologies and course texts of literature (the Norton, Bedford and Gardner anthologies), which provide the primary works that the essays in this volume read or that a student can read with these terms in hand.

How to Use This Book

The book is for students who have had a first course in literary studies and want to name and argue about the concepts of the discipline, and for advanced undergraduates and graduate students preparing for seminars in theory.

Start with McLaughlin's introduction, then read the terms that bear most directly on a current assignment. A useful sequence is one term from each part, for example Narrative, Interpretation and Ideology, to see how the essays differ. Read each essay with the primary text it discusses beside it, and note both the history of the term and how the demonstration reading changes what the term seems to mean. Use the references and the contributor list to find the critics' longer works, and end with Lentricchia's afterword.