Two-time Booker Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee is one of the world's greatest novelists. This thought-provoking collection gathers twenty-six of his essays on books and writing. In his opening piece, "What Is a Classic?", Coetzee asks, "What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?" He explores the answer by way of T. S. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach, a...(展开全部)

The only author ever to win the Booker Prize twice, J. M. Coetzee is, without question, one of the world's greatest novelists. Now his many admirers will have the pleasure of reading his significant body of literary criticism. This volume gathers together for the first time in book form, twenty-six pieces on books and writing, all but one previously published. Stranger Shores o...(展开全部)

Edmund Wilson was the dominant American literary critic from the 1920s until his death in 1972, but he was also far more than that: a chronicler of his times, a historian of ideas, a probing observer of himself and of the society around him. With this volume and a companion volume devoted to the 30s and 40s--the first two entries in what will be a series devoted to Wilson's wor...(展开全部)

Spitzer discusses the method he evolved for bringing together the two disciplines, linguistics and literary history, and examines the work of Cervantes, Racine, Diderot, and Claudel in the light of this theory. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the dist...(展开全部)

Writing about The Gaze of Orpheus, Geoffrey Hartman suggested that 'When we come to write the history of criticism for the 1940 to 1980 period, it will be found that Blanchot, together with Sartre, made French 'discourse' possible, both in its relentlessness and its acuity..This selection.is exemplary for its clearly translated and well-chosen excerpts from Blanchot's many infl...(展开全部)

Writing about The Gaze of Orpheus, Geoffrey Hartman suggested that 'When we come to write the history of criticism for the 1940 to 1980 period, it will be found that Blanchot, together with Sartre, made French 'discourse' possible, both in its relentlessness and its acuity..This selection.is exemplary for its clearly translated and well-chosen excerpts from Blanchot's many infl...(展开全部)

In this collection of acerbic essays, Ugresic dissects the nature of the contemporary book industry, which she argues is so infected with the need to create and promote literature that will appeal to the masses literally to everyone that if Thomas Mann were writing nowadays, his books wouldn't even be published in the U.S. because they're not sexy enough.A playful and biting cr...(展开全部)

A sociological history of literary studies—both as a discipline and as a profession. As the humanities in higher education struggle with a labor crisis and with declining enrollments, the travails of “English” have been especially acute and long-standing. No scholar has analyzed the discipline’s contradictions as authoritatively as John Guillory. In this much-anticipated new b...(展开全部)