The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century

The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century is a sustained critical examination of the developments in the field of literary studies from the early 2000s onwards within the context of the systematic problems in the humanities. This volume analyzes the origins of the current methods—including New Historicism, empiricism, New Formalism, postcritique, and others—and posits alternatives to the present state of literary studies. At a time when many aspects of current methods show a desire to adopt values from other disciplines to solve internal crises, this volume advocates a renewed focus on questions of form by means of the praxis of aesthetic study, close reading, and other modes of engaging directly with literary texts.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Introduction: “Criticism Today: Form, Critique, and the Experience of Literature”, Derek Attridge.- Chapter 2: “Is the Author Still Dead?”, Henry Staten.- Chapter 3: “Criticism and Attachment in the Neoliberal University”, Mir Ali Hosseini.- Chapter 4: “Darkness Visible: The Contingency of Critique”, Ellen Rooney.- Chapter 5: “Reading by Example: Disciplinary History for a Polemical Age”, Doug Battersby.- Chapter 6: “Does Knowledge Still Have a Home in the Humanities?”, William Rasch.- Chapter 7: “‘Our Beloved Codex’: Frank Kermode’s Modesty”, Ronan McDonald.- Chapter 8: “Polonius as Anti-Close-Reader: Towards a Poetics of the Putz”, Rachel Eisendrath.- Chapter 9: “What Kind of Person Should the Critic Be?”, Simon Grimble.- Chapter 10: “‘Slow time,’ ‘a Brooklet, scarce espied’: Close Reading, Cleanth Brooks, John Keats”, Susan J. Wolfson.- Chapter 11: “Poem as Field, Canon as Crystal”, Anirudh Sridhar.- Chapter 12: “Criticism and the Non-I, or, Rachel Cusk’s Sentences”, Tom Eyers.- Chapter 13: “Ecocide and Objectivity: Literary Thinking in How the Dead Dream”, Anna Kornbluh.- Chapter 14: Afterword, Heather Dubrow.

About the Author :
Anirudh Sridhar received a DPhil in English, on the topic of mathematics and poetry, from the University of Oxford, UK.  Mir Ali Hosseini is a PhD candidate in British and North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and a scholar of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English at the University of York, UK, and is the author of books on literary theory, poetry and poetics, and Irish and South African literature. He has taught in the UK, the USA, France, and Italy, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leverhulme Research Professorship.