T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Professor of French, Professor and Director of African American and Diaspora Studies, and Director of the W. You can enter in knowing nothing and come out with a reasonable grasp of Marxism, formalism, german idealism, feminism, queer theory, reader-response theory.

A prominent medievalist and feminist critic, Professor Finke is the author of Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Johns Hopkins UP), King Arthur and the Myth of History (University Press of Florida), Feminist Theory, Women's Writing (Cornell UP) and Women's Writing in English: The Middle Ages (Longman) and the editor of Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Cornell UP). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It's useful for someone, like me, who does not have time to read all of those philosophers and poets in-depth while taking two other classes and raising a child. Offering 191 pieces by 157 authors, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Third Edition, is more comprehensive and more varied in its selection than any other anthology. For me, the largest weakness of this anthology is that aside from a very brief synopsis (that at times confuses more than elucidates) in the introductions, each essay or section(s) from a book is simply given with no further explanation.This anthology of critical writing ranges from Gorgias and Plato to Sigmund Freud and Mikhail Bakhtin.

Those problems aside, I like the book's introductions and appreciated that for a tome of nearly 3,000 pages it carries surprisingly well in a backpack. A prominent medievalist and feminist critic, Professor Finke is the author of Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Johns Hopkins UP), King Arthur and the Myth of History (University Press of Florida), Feminist Theory, Women’s Writing (Cornell UP) and Women’s Writing in English: The Middle Ages (Longman) and the editor of Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Cornell UP). The Norton Anthology provides a very good biography of each author, which then gives you sufficient background knowledge to be able to understand the primary texts.Obviously, some excerpts are covered in more detail than others, as the book is only approximately 2700 pages long and therefore doesn't contain the full publications by each of these figures, merely snippets and excerpts. I loved the diversity in their choice of authors (still way to go but it is an important step towards more inclusivity). A scholar of American literature and American literary criticism, Professor Cain is the author of The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature, and Reform in English Studies (Johns Hopkins UP), F. A foremost historian of contemporary literary criticism and theory, he is the author of the standard history, American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s as well as Deconstructive Criticism and Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (all three books published by Columbia UP), Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows (SUNY Press), Theory Matters (Routledge), Living with Theory (Blackwell), and American Literary Criticism since the 1930s, 2nd edition (Routledge). However, anthologies of this kind and this generation fundamentally distort their contents by their narrow vision of selection and contextualization.

A leading critic of postmodernism and social theories relating to literature, he is the author of Postmodernism and its Critics (Cornell UP), Hannah Arendt: A Critical Introduction (U of Minnesota P), Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics (Cornell UP), and American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time (UNC Press), and editor (with Craig Calhoun) of Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (U of Minnesota P). Hope my grades climb up a bit now as I finally have a chance of understanding the more obscure theory references! It is also a really helpful guide for those who study American literature and culture; it is written in a very organized way that will make it easy, even for freshmen, to understand the literary movements and the smooth transcedence from one movement to the next.She was also the translator of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination (U of Chicago P) and Stéphane Mallarmé’s Divagations (Harvard UP/Belknap Press). A book that has served me well for my English undergraduate degree; a great wealth and variety of philosophers' and theorists' seminal texts along with biographical information and explanation of major themes. My end result is a list of books/theorists to explore and my 1st impressions of them jotted into a notebook or onto this table of contents.