G. Douglas Atkins – författare

This is the first book to explore the opportunities deconstruction opens up for the teaching of both composition and literature. It is a unique and timely response to crucial issues facing teachers of composition and literature at all levels: high school, college, and university.

“The critical rage” (and likely to remain so), deconstruction is the most controversial and arguably the most promising critical-theoretical movement of recent decades. It has proven to be enormously influential as a strategy of textual analysis, thanks in large part to the enterprise of such critics as J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Barbara E. Johnson, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, all of whom are contributors to this collection. The implications of deconstruction for the teaching of both writing and reading are just now being explored, however. These groundbreaking essays exemplify and assess that potential.

The scope of consideration is wide. The essays all discuss deconstruction, treat its pedagogical implications, and evaluate its impact upon the teaching of composition and literature. In doing so, the contributors address specific questions concerning “the literary crisis” and “the crisis in literary studies” and offer a reasoned, balanced, and provocative account of the usefulness of deconstruction in solving at least some of the problems that beset the profession.

`The critic explicitly acknowledges his dependence on prior words that make his word a kind of answer. He calls to other texts "that they might answer him."''

Geoffrey Hartman is the first book devoted to an exploration of the `intellectual poetry'' of the critic who, whether or not he `represents the future of the profession'', is a unique and major voice in twentieth-century criticism.

Professor Atkins explains clearly Hartman''s key ideas and places his work in the contexts of Romanticism and Judaism on which he has written extensively. In Geoffrey Hartman he provides a valuable introduction to a major critical voice who has called into question our assumptions about the distinction between commentary and imaginative literature.

`The critic explicitly acknowledges his dependence on prior words that make his word a kind of answer. He calls to other texts "that they might answer him."''

Geoffrey Hartman is the first book devoted to an exploration of the `intellectual poetry'' of the critic who, whether or not he `represents the future of the profession'', is a unique and major voice in twentieth-century criticism.

Professor Atkins explains clearly Hartman''s key ideas and places his work in the contexts of Romanticism and Judaism on which he has written extensively. In Geoffrey Hartman he provides a valuable introduction to a major critical voice who has called into question our assumptions about the distinction between commentary and imaginative literature.

This accessible, informed, and engaging book offers fresh, new avenues into Keats’s poems and letters, including a valuable introduction to “the responsible poet.” Focusing on Keats’s sense of responsibility to truth, poetry, and the reader, G. Douglas Atkins, a noted T.S. Eliot critic, writes as an ama-teur. He reads the letters as literary texts, essayistic and dramatic; the Odes in comparison with Eliot’s treatment of similar subjects; “The Eve of St. Agnes” by adding to his respected earlier article on the poem an addendum outlining a bold new reading; “Lamia” by focusing on its complex and perplexing treatment of philosophy and imagination and revealing how Keats literally represents philosophy as functioning within poetry. Comparing Keats with Eliot, poet-philosopher, this book generates valuable insight into Keats’s successful and often sophisticated poetic treatment of ideas, accentuating the image of him as “the responsible poet.”