Literary and Critical Theory最新文献

{"title":"Gilles Deleuze","authors":"P. Patton, Jing Yin","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0079","url":null,"abstract":"Gilles Deleuze was one of the most important French philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Born in 1925, he studied philosophy in Paris at the Lycée Carnot and the Sorbonne during the Second World War, passing the agrégation in 1949. He was trained in the history of philosophy by Ferdinand Alquié, Georges Canguilhem, and Jean Hippolyte, among others, and his early works were mostly monographs on individual philosophers, including Hume (Empiricism and Subjectivity, 1991 [1953]), Nietzsche (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1983 [1962]), Kant (Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 1983 [1963]), and Bergson (Bergsonism, 1988 [1966]). He also published a book on Proust during this early period, which signaled a lifelong preoccupation with literature (Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, 2000 [1964]). He published essays on Sacher-Masoch (“Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty by Gilles Deleuze and Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 1991 [1967]), Beckett, T. E. Lawrence, Melville, and Whitman (collected in Essays Critical and Clinical, 1997 [1993]). The end of this early period saw the publication of Deleuze’s doctoral studies, Difference and Repetition (1994 [1968]) and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990 [1968]), followed by The Logic of Sense (1990 [1969]). Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference intersected at some points with Derrida’s philosophy, but also departed from it in that Deleuze saw his practice of philosophy as straightforwardly metaphysical and constructive rather than deconstructive. In the 1960s, Deleuze taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. In 1969, at Foucault’s invitation, he took up a post at the experimental University of Paris 8 at Vincennes (later St. Denis), where he taught until his retirement in 1987. His encounter with Félix Guattari in the aftermath of May 1968 led to their two coauthored volumes under the general title Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1983 [1972]), followed by A Thousand Plateaus (1987 [1980]). This work produced a number of concepts that have been taken up in diverse fields across the humanities and social sciences. They also coauthored Kafka: For a Minor Literature (1986 [1975]), and a decade later they produced a reflective account of their practice of philosophy: What Is Philosophy? (1994 [1991]). A final phase of Deleuze’s work began after the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, and continued until his death in 1995. During this period he published an essay on the painting of Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 2003 [1981]) and two short monographs: Foucault (1988 [1986]) and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993 [1988]). He also published a very influential two-volume study of the nature and history of cinema: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986 [1983]) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989 [1985]). As noted above, a collection of his literary philosophical essays, Essays Critical and Clinical, appeared in 1993 before being translated ","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121482081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Barbara Johnson","authors":"Keja L. Valens","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0078","url":null,"abstract":"Barbara Johnson (b. 1947–d. 2009) bridged the heyday of deconstruction and the turn to theory in the 1970s and the ascendance of cultural studies and the turn to ethics in the early 21st century. As Johnson moved the insights of deconstruction into areas such as feminisms, African-American studies, and cultural studies, her attention to “differences within” engaged not only language and rhetoric but also politics, popular culture, and the power of differentiation to both oppress and express particular subjects. Johnson’s career, cut short by a neurodegenerative disease, is framed by her work in translation of Derrida’s Dissemination at the beginning of her career and Mallarmé’s Divagations toward its end. She cast her critical and theoretical project as the translation of structuralism and poststructuralism into literary insight, a process that is easily recognizable in her most anthologized, reprinted, and oft-cited essays, “The Frame of Reference,” “Melville’s Fist,” “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” and “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Johnson’s work transports critical frames and moves across a variety of genres and fields, from psychoanalysis to law and from Romanticism to 20th-century American popular culture. Her unparalleled readings—of words, concepts, stories, poems—examine how texts do, and undo, what they say. In the process, Johnson’s writing playfully and often surprisingly displaces authority (even her own) to reveal the poetic and political work of multivalence. The wide range of anthologies that include essays by Johnson attest to the tremendous scope of her work and to the difficulty of summarizing even where its major contributions lie.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129442449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bertolt Brecht","authors":"M. Silberman","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0076","url":null,"abstract":"Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht (b. 10 February 1898–d. 14 August 1956) was christened Berthold, but he was known professionally as Bertolt or Bert Brecht. Regarded as the most important German-language dramatist of the 20th century, he counts also among the most frequently staged non-English-language playwrights in the Anglophone world. In addition, the new performance style he articulated in his writings on theater practice, dramaturgy, and actor training has been influential around the world among directors and teachers who explore the role of politics on stage. Less known in the Anglophone world is Brecht’s status as a major lyric poet and author of numerous prose works, including anecdotes, short stories, dialogues, and novels. Born in the southern German city of Augsburg, he was the elder of two brothers in a solidly middle-class family. Already as an adolescent he suffered from nervousness and cardiac problems, later contracting serious bladder infections that probably contributed to his heart failure at the age of fifty-eight. Brecht’s writing career began as a teenager when he helped to edit and author his school newspaper Die Ernte (The Harvest) and contributed articles to local and regional newspapers. After completing his schooling in 1917, he was called up for the draft, but because of health problems he was deferred from military conscription. Instead he matriculated at the university in Munich. In October 1918, just before the war ended, Brecht was drafted as a medical orderly and served briefly at a military hospital in Augsburg. Returning to Munich in early 1919, he moved in Bohemian circles, penning his first poems and anti-expressionist plays. In 1921 the university expelled him for non-attendance, and after winning the prestigious Kleist Prize for his early plays, he moved to Berlin in 1924, the hub of innovative German theater. The surprise success in fall 1928 of The Threepenny Opera (with music by Kurt Weill) launched Brecht’s international reputation, and in the context of increasing political polarization in the Weimar Republic he identified more and more with Marxism and labor union activism. After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, he abruptly fled Germany, settling finally in Denmark with his family. Meanwhile his books were burned in May 1933 and his plays were banned from the German stage. With the beginning of the war in 1939 and the rapid Nazi occupation of European countries, Brecht was forced to move to Sweden, then Finland, and finally reached Los Angeles after crossing through the Soviet Union with his family in July 1941. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in October 1947 under suspicion of communist sympathies, Brecht—who had never been a member of any communist party—left for Switzerland immediately after testifying. In late 1948 he settled in East Berlin, where officials offered him his own theater, the Berliner Ensemble, under the management of his wife Helene Weigel. Brecht i","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132251326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Adrienne Rich","authors":"C. Birkle","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0075","url":null,"abstract":"Adrienne Cecile Rich (b. 16 May 1929 in Baltimore, MD; d. 27 March 2012 in Santa Cruz, CA) is one of the best-known feminist poets, essayists, and activists from the 1950s onward into the 21st century. She published about twenty-six volumes of poetry, six collections of essays, and quite a number of individual essays in numerous journals or as single volumes. She gave hundreds of interviews, and the scholarly studies on her work are too numerous to be counted. In most of her poems and essays, Rich focused on her own and, thus, a woman’s relationship to a world that she described as patriarchal, with predetermined and fixed gender roles that made being a successful poet, having a family, and being a mother and wife incompatible—an experience depicted in “‘When We Dead Awaken’: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971). This self-exploration and yearning to understand how she herself might fit into a male-dominated world shaped Rich’s poetry and prose, accompanied by a strong sense of social criticism. She received a number of prestigious awards, prizes, and fellowships, among them the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1950, for her first collection of poems, A Change of World (1951); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952); the National Book Award for Poetry (1974); honorary doctorates from Smith College (1979) and Harvard University (1989); several lifetime achievement awards; the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2006); and many more. In the late 1960s, she joined Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde on the faculty of the City College of New York and, thus, took her first steps into the African American and, to some extent, lesbian community. The year 1970 was a turning point in her life and career, with the divorce from her husband and his subsequent suicide and the publication of poetry that inaugurated her rise as a leading feminist figure. In the course of the 1970s, she came out as a lesbian (see “It Is the Lesbian in US . . .” [1976], The Dream of a Common Language [1978], and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” [1980]) and turned to political activism. Her long essay Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) has become her most frequently discussed work, in which she distinguishes between motherhood as a personal experience and motherhood as an institution that controls women. To being a woman, a mother, a writer, and a lesbian, she later added her concerns about her own Jewishness. In the 1980s, her poetry and prose became manifestations of her own physical pain and remained true to her idea of the “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1978). For Rich, the feminist slogan “the personal is the political” was always true. After 2000 she participated in antiwar movements and continued to write poetry and prose. From 1976 until her death in 2012, she lived with her partner, the Jamaican-born writer and editor Michelle Cliff, in California.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115178795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jurij Lotman","authors":"Anna Maria Lorusso","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0074","url":null,"abstract":"Jurij (or Yuri) Lotman (b. 1922–d. 1993) was a Russian semiotician and cofounder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics. A Russian philologist by education, his interests ranged from aesthetics to literary and cultural history; from narrative theory to intellectual history; from cinema to mythology. At the core of his theory is a holistic approach to culture as a system whose main feature is the modeling property. Culture is a structural mechanism that generates structurality through a primary modeling system (the verbal language) and secondary modeling systems (art, literature, religion, mythology, etc.). Clearly inspired in the 1970s by the emergence of structuralism in Moscow, over the years he gave an increasingly dynamic interpretation of “structure,” focusing on the evolution of systems and continuous hybridizations of languages. The idea of dialogue as a condition for cultural evolution is a personal echo of Bakhtin’s theory, which assumes an absolute centrality in Lotman. Cultural evolution comes from the relationship with the Other and the exchange with spaces different from our own. In this frame, the idea of border is also pivotal: cultural identities need to define their own borders, but it is precisely on the borders—lines of separation—that we find the maximum exchange. These ideas form the basis of the theory of semiosphere, a successful neologism that, echoing the biosphere of Vernadskij, points out the holistic, functional, and self-organized quality of cultural systems. In his last works (published posthumously in 2009 and 2013), Lotman’s interest in history and temporal layers of cultures is increasingly in the foreground. He focuses on the predictability or otherwise of historical situations, putting the category of explosion at the center of his reflection, as a moment of unexpected acceleration of the historical-cultural dynamism and the creativity of systems. During the 1970s, Lotman’s works and those of other Soviet semioticians were widely read and proved influential, especially in the field of Slavic studies. In the 1980s, they become influential in American and West European academia. Among the scholars who used Lotman’s concepts are the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, the semiotician Umberto Eco, the reception theorist Wolfgang Iser, and the feminist critic Julia Kristeva. From 2000s onward, Lotman’s legacy has been pivotal in the field of semiotics, and relevant also to the field of cultural and media studies.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129192129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bernard Lonergan","authors":"Patrick H. Byrne","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0071","url":null,"abstract":"As with many thinkers of his generation, the Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Joseph Francis Xavier Lonergan, SJ (b. 1904–d. 1984), sought to overcome the limitations of the traditions of thought that he inherited. Although a Catholic theologian by profession, he found it necessary to also think through major issues posed by modern philosophy, science, modern mathematics, the historical condition of humanity, economics, ethics, art, and education. He became best known for his theory of knowledge in the decades immediately following the publication of his masterwork, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957). However, the discovery of his numerous unpublished writings following his death in 1984 required a major rethinking of his project. In light of those discoveries, his work on the theory of knowledge has come to be understood as one contribution to his broader effort to find an adequate way to think about and respond authentically to the human condition as historical. As he once put it, “All my work has been introducing history into Catholic theology.” He was dissatisfied with the static metaphysical context of the scholastic philosophy he was taught as a young man, as well as with the historicism that was adopted by many thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He refined his ideas in numerous unpublished essays, written both before and after the publication of Insight, that addressed the questions of historical process, knowledge, method, and responsibility. He has long been mistakenly categorized as a “transcendental Thomist,” and therefore rejected as a subjectivist and antirealist by many Thomist authors and teachers. It is certainly true that Lonergan was deeply indebted to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but his studies found in Aquinas a theory of knowledge and a kind of realism that was, and still is, at odds with other prevailing Thomist interpretations. Prior to his two studies of Aquinas, he was already deeply influenced by his readings of Plato, John Henry Newman, Hegel, and Marx. These thinkers prepared him to find in Aquinas ideas that earlier scholars had overlooked—ideas that he would develop into his own unique treatments of knowledge, science, the natural world, history, truth, goodness, and God. He taught at the University of Toronto (Regis College), the Gregorian University (Rome), Harvard University, and Boston College.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116797128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Louise Rosenblatt","authors":"John R. Shook","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0077","url":null,"abstract":"Louise Rosenblatt (b. 1904–d. 2005) was a highly influential thinker in literary and critical theory, reading pedagogy, and education. She was professor of education at New York University from 1948 until 1972, and she continued to teach for many years at other universities. The impact of her writings extends to aesthetics, communication and media studies, and cultural studies. Her transactional theory of reading literature earned a permanent place among methodologies applied to the study of reader comprehension and improving the teaching of reading, from preschool to college-age years. She is most widely known for her “reader response” theory of literature. The process of reading is a dynamic transaction between the reader and the text, in which meaningful ideas arise for readers from their own thoughtful and creative interpretations. Her first book, Literature as Exploration, which was published in 1938, has gone through five editions and remains in print in the early 21st century. Her last book, Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays, was published in 2005 and contained selected essays from each decade of her career. Rosenblatt’s view of literary experience threw down a challenge to a dominant paradigm during the 1940s and 1950s, namely the New Criticism. New Criticism held that authentic meanings of a piece of creative writing—a novel, story, drama, poem, and so on—are already within the text itself, requiring attention to that somewhat concealed yet objective truth. Rosenblatt took the pragmatist approach, starting from the aesthetics of reading. As a member of the Conference on Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences at Columbia University during the 1930s, she studied John Dewey, Charles Peirce, and William James. During this time, she married the pragmatist philosopher Sidney Ratner. Rosenblatt applied her knowledge of pragmatism to the question of understanding creative writing. For pragmatism, all experiences are creative fusions of intersecting processes, some from within and some from without. Any comprehension of a text blends the reader’s particular approach for appreciating it together with the capacity of the text to provoke a variety of stimulating ideas. The emotional and the factual are rarely found in pure forms; only a gradual range from the affective to the cognitive can characterize lived experience. Understanding the process of reading in its fundamental experiential situation has been a revolutionary philosophical position, impacting both childhood education and literary theory. Rosenblatt’s work continues to inspire fresh academic research and curricular innovations.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127943583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bruno Bettelheim","authors":"N. Szajnberg","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0072","url":null,"abstract":"Bruno Bettelheim (b. 23 August 1903—d. 13 March 1990) was one of the foremost 20th-century thinkers about psychoanalysis, education, child therapy, and child development and treatment. He was born into a well-off Viennese family—his father, Anton, owned a lumber processing business, and his mother was the former Paula Seidler. (One grandmother had some twelve children, one of whom, he believed, was likely schizophrenic.) He attended gymnasium for a classical education and began his doctorate at the University of Vienna, where he studied until his father died. Bettelheim interrupted his studies to run the family business until 1937, then he completed his thesis on Kant and aesthetics. Some five decades later, he returned to this first love of aesthetics when he was invited to lecture in New York on art. He spoke on the artists who captured his heart and mind—Klimt, Kokoschka, and especially Schiele—artists who attempted to portray on the surface what dwelt within man’s soul. He contrasted them with the Impressionists, who focused on how surfaces shifted with changes of light. Reviewing Bettelheim’s contributions to our thinking means covering the many subjects about which he wrote and thought deeply, particularly after his concentration camp experiences. Like many Jewish refugee intellectuals from Europe—Fromm, Szasz, Erikson, Koestler, Adorno (and the unsuccessful refugee, Walter Benjamin)—his range of thinking was broad. Bettelheim’s writing covered the milieu and residential treatment of children, parenting, loss of autonomy in extreme settings, social prejudice, raising children in kibbutz, fairy tales, mistranslation (and misunderstandings) of Freud, and education. The essay “Freud’s Vienna,” as well as Freud and Man’s Soul, is the closest he came to a memoir. Prior to the Nazi Anschluss, Bettelheim joined the underground army in Austria as an officer. Once the Anschluss was announced, he was surprised, even shocked, that Austria’s neighbors did nothing and the army folded. He spent two months making sure his decommissioned soldiers were safe, and then escaped to the Czech border, where the Czechs promptly handed him over to the Nazis, who imprisoned him in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps beginning in May 1938.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124721895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"John Crowe Ransom","authors":"P. Quinlan","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0070","url":null,"abstract":"John Crowe Ransom (b. 30 April 1888–d. 3 July 1974) was an American poet, Southern Agrarian, literary critic, and editor of the Kenyon Review, arguably the most influential “little magazine” of the mid-20th century. Educated at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Ransom began writing poetry as a member of the Fugitive group that included Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren and had its own short-lived magazine in the early 1920s. Most of the poems on which his reputation rests—often on love or death, never long, sometimes quirky, and with intermittent archaic wording—are to be found in Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Ransom won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1951 and the National Book Award for his Selected Poems in 1964. Following their Fugitive period, Ransom and his associates moved on to become Agrarians, arguing in their 1930 I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition that the South’s distinctive characteristic was its agrarian culture, separating it from both the capitalist industrial North and Soviet Communism. As an English professor at Vanderbilt where historical studies of literary texts took precedence, Ransom argued and eventually won the cause of the literary critic, a victory that over time changed the hierarchies in the profession at large. The text itself, its structures and images and their complex interrelationship, was what was most important. His 1941 volume of theoretical essays, The New Criticism, made Ransom the quasi founding father—there were many others—of a movement that would dominate the academy for the next three decades. Always fascinated by, but wary of, the sciences as their place within the university increased exponentially, Ransom sought over and over to define the kind of supplementary but equally essential knowledge that poetry offered. As founding editor of the Kenyon Review in 1939 and director of the Kenyon School of English, Ransom exercised enormous influence on both the teaching of literature at American colleges and universities, and on several emerging poets and novelists, most notably Robert Lowell. By the mid-1960s, however, many of Ransom’s critical and social positions had come under challenge, as has his status as a “major minor poet” in several recent critiques. Nevertheless, current studies are also finding overlooked fissures in his poems, and, in the age of digitized textuality, fresh inspiration in his Agrarian and New Critical forays.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134647802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jean Laplanche","authors":"Silvia Brandão Skowronsky","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0116","url":null,"abstract":"Jean Laplanche (b. 1924–d. 2012) was a French psychoanalyst and vintner. Among the most innovative and theoretically rigorous thinkers of his generation, his work is characterized by a return to the letter of Freud’s text, a method of reading Freud according to Freudian principles, and a complete rethinking of the foundations of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Under the Vichy regime, he joined the French Resistance in 1943. The following year, he entered the École Normale Supérieure where he studied philosophy with Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, and Ferdinand Alquié. In the years 1946–1947, he received a scholarship to Harvard University where he developed an interest in psychoanalysis through the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations. Upon returning to Paris, he became a founding member of the revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie. In this same period, he entered into analysis with Jacques Lacan, who remained his mentor until 1963. Laplanche signaled his formal break with Lacan in 1964. However, his intellectual break was well underway when, at the historic Bonneval conference of 1960, in a paper with Serge Leclaire, he directly opposed Lacan’s theory of the unconscious “structured like a language.” In 1967, with J.-B. Pontalis, he published The Language of Psychoanalysis, today the definitive encyclopedia of Freudian thought. The fruits of this project were distilled in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970). A book of extraordinary insight, Laplanche showed how Freud’s thought is structured by the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, wherein the repression of the sexual unconscious is itself the object of repression. This critical return to Freud was intensified through a series of lectures published as Problématiques. Lessons from the first five volumes are condensed in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1987). Whereas Life and Death showed how the sexual drive “leans on” vital instinct, thus restoring the rightful place of sexuality in the psychoanalytic understanding of the human being, New Foundations presents nothing less than a refounding of the entire psychoanalytic enterprise. From a recovery of Freud’s famously abandoned seduction theory, Laplanche developed a “general theory of seduction,” which explains how the situation of primal seduction, the primacy of the other in the transmission of enigmatic messages from adult to infant, is simultaneously the irreducible foundation of psychoanalysis and human subjectivity. With career achievements as co-founder of the Association Psychanalytique de France, professor of psychoanalysis and founder of the Center for Psychoanalytic Research at the Université de Paris VII, founder of the journal Psychanalyse à l’université, and scientific director of the translation of Freud’s complete works into French, the magnitude of his thought is only now starting to penetrate Anglophone audiences.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127275377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}