Countercurrents: On the Primacy of Texts in Literary Criticism (SUNY series, The Margins of Literature) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0791409414 ISBN 13: 9780791409411

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1992

Synopsis

In their readings of texts, the authors address the topics of theory, narrative, aesthetics, the idea of the text, and of specific moments in cultural history. The chapters cover a range of authors: Plato, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Chariteo, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Kleist, Gode, Edith Wharton, Pirandello, Kafka, Sartre, Saint-John Perse, Paz, Roubaud, Sanguineti, and Tomlinson. They also deal with philosophers: Peirce, Nietzsche, Saussure, Husserl, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Heidegger, Jakobson, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The book opens up our relationships to the past and the usefulness or otherwise of the metaphors we use in our attempt to understand and participate in it.

Although Countercurrents deals diversely with literary periods, authors, and critics, it speaks within the civilized and civilizing universe of our language and the texts we create. Running beneath the antihumanistic flotilla that skims the surface of texts for theory, the authors plumb for treasures from the ocean's floor.

About this title

About the Author

Raymond Adolph Prier is an independent scholar whose previous works include Archaic Logic: Symbol and Structure in Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles; and Thauma Idesthai: The Phenomonology of Sight and Appearance in Archaic Greek.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791409414
• ISBN 13: 9780791409411
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 302
• Editor: Prier Raymond Adolph