Status
Call number
Collection
Publication
Description
The third edition of the MLA's widely used Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures features sixteen completely new essays by leading scholars. Designed to highlight relations among languages and forms of discourse, the volume is organized into three sections. "Understanding Language" provides a broad overview of the field of linguistics, with special attention to language acquisition and the social life of languages. "Forming Texts" offers tools for understanding how speakers and writers shape language; it examines scholarship in the distinct but interrelated fields of rhetoric, composition, and poetics. "Reading Literature and Culture" continues the work of the first two sections by introducing major areas of critical study. The nine essays in this section cover textual and historical scholarship; interpretation; comparative, cultural, and translation studies; and the interdisciplinary topics of gender, sexuality, race, and migrations (among others). As in previous volumes, an epilogue examines the role of the scholar in contemporary society. Each essay discusses the significance, underlying assumptions, and limits of an important field of inquiry; traces the historical development of its subject; introduces key terms; outlines modes of research now being pursued; postulates future developments; and provides a list of suggestions for further reading. This book will interest any member of the scholarly community seeking a review of recent scholarship, while it provides an indispensable resource for undergraduate and graduate students of modern languages and literatures.… (more)
User reviews
[T]heory in literary studies seems more concretely diverse in its concerns than philosophy has been, at least in modern times….At
The unmasterability of theory is as major cause of resistance to it. No matter how well versed you may think yourself, you can never be sure whether you ‘have to read’ Jean Baudrillard, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Wayne Booth, Hélène Cixous, C.L.R. James, Jürgen Habermas, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, and I.A. Richards or whether you can ‘safely’ forget them….A good deal of the hostility to theory no doubt comes from the fact that to admit the importance of theory is to make an open-ended commitment, to leave oneself in a position where there are always important things one doesn’t know. But this is very much the condition of life itself, especially in the realm of literature—though one function of a literary canon is to conceal this. The principal virtue of a canon, one might say, is that you know what to feel guilty about not having read. You can then either flaunt or hide the fact that you have never actually read The Magic Mountain or didn’t get past book 1 of the Fairie Queene or could never abide Balzac. Today, with the canon opening or expanding in all directions…is no longer clear what a professor of Spanish or English…is supposed to know. The reach of theory vastly compounds this problem for both teachers and students, creating possibilities of anxiety about one’s ignorance of philosophy or psychoanalysis or the history of the body, for instance.
Theory is not a domain one could ever master, though it simultaneously presents mastery as a goal (you hope that theoretical reading will give you the concepts, the metalanguage, to order and understand the phenomena that concern you) and makes mastery impossible, not just because there is always more to know but more specifically and perhaps more painfully because theory is itself the questioning of presumed results and the assumptions on which they are based. The nature of theory, by this account, is to undo, through a contesting of premises and postulates, what you thought you knew, so that there may appear to be no real accumulation of knowledge or expertise.