Using key passages to understand literature, theory and criticism / Barry Laga

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1 Becoming a subject -- 2 Scripting identity -- 3 Doing not describing -- 4 Enjoying the carnivalesque -- 5 Reading as writing -- 6 Simulating the real -- 7 Creating a space between -- 8 Performing gender -- 9 Locating trauma -- 10 Intersecting identities -- 11 Locating alterity -- 12 Poaching texts -- 13 Cultivating rhizomes -- 14 Reconciling double consciousness -- 15 Shocking readers -- 16 Joining power and knowledge -- 17 Revealing the uncanny -- 18 Questioning human/nonhuman boundaries -- 19 Historicizing and contextualizing -- 20 Signifying through time -- 21 Thinking ecologically -- 22 Recognizing conceptual metaphors -- 23 Representing disability -- 24 Losing and recovering our sovereignty -- 25 Resisting the dominant culture -- 26 Adapting and appropriating -- 27 Describing homosocial relationships -- 28 Defamiliarizing the familiar -- 29 Questioning gender binaries -- 30 Building on another's work: identifying key concepts

Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism is a completely fresh and innovative approach to teaching and learning literary theory: using short passages of theory to make sense of literary and cultural texts. It focuses on the key concepts that help readers understand literature and cultural events in new and provocative ways. Covering a wide variety of iconic and contemporary theorists, the book offers a broad chronological and global overview, including thirty passages from theorists such as Viktor Shklovsky, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Jean Baudrillard, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michel Foucault, Monique Wittig, and Eve Sedgwick. Built on the premise that scholars use theory pragmatically, Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism identifies problems, puzzles, and questions readers may encounter when they read a story, watch a film, or look at artwork. It explains, in detail, thirty concepts that help readers make sense of these works and invites students to apply the concepts to a range of writing and research projects. The textbook concludes by helping students read theory with an eye on finding productive passages and writing their own “theory chapter,” signaling a shift from student as critic to student as theorist. Used as a main text in introductory theory courses or as a supplement to any literature, film, theater, or art course, this book helps students read closely and think critically.