Doing Things With Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393027139 ISBN 13: 9780393027136

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1989

A collection of the author's works on criticism in the subjects of poetry, literature, art, and culture

About the Author:

M. H. Abrams (1912―2015) was Class of 1916 Professor of English, Emeritus at Cornell University. He received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Prize for The Mirror and the Lamp and the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize for Natural Supernaturalism. He is also the author of The Milk of Paradise, A Glossary of Literary Terms, The Correspondent Breeze, and Doing Things with Texts. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Postwar fellowships, the Award in Humanistic Studies from the Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984), the Distinguished Scholar Award by the Keats-Shelley Society (1987), and the Award for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990). In 1999 The Mirror and the Lamp was ranked twenty-fifth among the Modern Library's "100 best nonfiction books written in English during the twentieth century."

From Publishers Weekly:

The author, a literary traditionalist, is under whelmed by fashionable deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida or "Newreaders" Harold Bloom and Stanley Fish. By treating works of art as self-sufficient objects, these critics often fail to grasp the meanings that a poem, story or novel generates as a human document, Abrams charges. In a group of essays and reviews geared to the serious student or scholar, the Cornell professor emeritus pulls the rugs out from under his opponents by analyzing "art-for-the-sake-of-art" criticism from a sociological standpoint, tracing its roots to 18th-century connoisseurship and the codification wd. ok? (not in web 3 or 9)/I think it should be codification/gs of literature. Throughout, Abrams ( The Mirror and the Lamp ) engages in dialogue with Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Wordsworth, Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Milton.
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