Robert Scholes - Böcker

For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from ancient times to the contemporary period, and it included a chapter on the oral heritage of written narrative and an appendix on the interior monologue in ancient texts.The fortieth anniversary edition of this groundbreaking work has been revised and expanded to include a new preface and a lengthy chapter on developments in narrative theory since 1966 by James Phelan. This chapter describes the principles and practices of structuralist, cognitive, feminist, and rhetorical approaches to narrative, paying special attention to their work on plot, character, and narrative discourse. A continued leader in the field of narrative studies, The Nature of Narrative offers unique and invaluable histories of both narrative and narrative theory.

For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from ancient times to the contemporary period, and it included a chapter on the oral heritage of written narrative and an appendix on the interior monologue in ancient texts.The fortieth anniversary edition of this groundbreaking work has been revised and expanded to include a new preface and a lengthy chapter on developments in narrative theory since 1966 by James Phelan. This chapter describes the principles and practices of structuralist, cognitive, feminist, and rhetorical approaches to narrative, paying special attention to their work on plot, character, and narrative discourse.A continued leader in the field of narrative studies, The Nature of Narrative offers unique and invaluable histories of both narrative and narrative theory.

From time to time a current of thought sweeps through a culture and moves its most disparate elements in the same direction. Such a current is structuralism. Reacting against "modernist" alienation and fragmentation, it is an integrative and holistic way of looking at the world; it seeks reality not in individual things but in the relationships among them. Its aim, says Robert Scholes, is nothing less than the unification of all the sciences into a new system of belief. The impact of structuralism on literature and literary study is the concern of this extraordinarily lucid book. Mr. Scholes explores the linguistic background of structuralism, its historical connections to romanticism and Russian formalism, and the theory and practice of the leading contemporary structuralist literary critics. "In Scholes’s book we have beautifully lucid, and at the same time intelligently critical, accounts of such areas of controversy as Jakobson and Riffaterre on Baudelaire’s Les Chats; Jolles’s Simple Forms and the drama speculations of Souriau; Propp on the folktale . . . and other Russian ‘formalist’ critics; Lévi-Strauss on myth; Greimas, Bremond and Todorov on narrative structure and Barthes and Genette on analysis of the meaning-structure of a literary text. . . . Those already persuaded of the importance of the field will see this book as . . . perhaps the most valuable general work available."-- Times Higher Education Supplement

“Accessible yet challenging, this book will be the indispensable introductory text for semiotics—indeed for any theoretical course in the humanities and social sciences that deals with the theory of these disciplines.”—Choice“The book offers . . . a clutch of examples of semiotics usefully and intelligently applied, which Schole’s patient, cheerful tone and his resolutely concrete vocabulary manage to combine into a breezily informative American confection.”—Terence Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement“This critique demonstrates once more that Scholes . . . is one of the most authoritative scholars in the field of semiotics.”—The Antioch Review“[Scholes] applies the range of semiotic theory to a series of other texts—poems, stories, films, a scene from a play, bumper stickers, even a part of the human anatomy. . . . When we finish this text (which includes a useful glossary and descriptive bibliography), we feel that we have learned the basic principles of semiotics and can apply them in our teaching and criticism; as a bonus, we gain many new insights into familiar texts.”—Richard Pearce, Novel“[Scholes] is among our best interpreters of literary theory. . . . He provides not only an argument for semiotics but an informed criticism of it as well.”—Martin Green, The Literary Review

“Robert Scholes has written an enviable book on the uses and abuses of literary theory in the teaching of literature.  One of [his] most forceful points…is that ‘literary theory’ is not something a teacher may either ‘use’ or not use, for teaching itself is an unavoidably theoretical activity.”—Gerald Graff, Novel“Scholes’ emphasis in Textual Power is indicated by the book’s subtitle.  After a provocative analysis of disciplinary values and departmental tendencies…[he] proposes that ‘we must stop “teaching literature” and start studying texts’…His book is essential for college libraries.”—R.C. Gebhardt, Choice“There is no issue more current, more relevant to the present scene, than the problem of pedagogy and its relation to contemporary theory. Textual Power is an important, provocative, and above all useful contribution to this discussion.”—Gregory L. UlmerRobert Scholes, author of Structuralism in Literature and Semiotics and Interpretation among other books, is Alumni-Alumnae University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Discussing a wide range of literary theory in a clear and accessible way, prize-winning author Robert Scholes here continues his ongoing construction of a humane semiotic approach to the problems of reading, writing, and teaching.  Taking the view that “all the world’s a text,” Scholes considers numerous texts from life and literature, including photographs, paintings, and television commercials as well as biographies and novels.“A significant and thoughtful effort to think about the responsibilities of reading in the wake of deconstruction.”—ChoiceProtocols of Reading is a personal, avuncular book, attractive in its common sense and brevity.”—Wendy Steiner, Times Literary Supplement“A complex argument developed in delightful plain English, Protocols of Reading sees both textual fundamentalism and deconstructive debunking as needful opposites in an oscillation that Scholes labels nihilistic hermeneutics.  Fine-tuning this oscillation is what the humanistic enterprise is all about, he suggests; it is our key to the true connection between reading and ethics.”—Richard A. Lanham, University of California, Los AngelesRobert Scholes, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Brown University, is also the author of Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English; Semiotics and Interpretation; and Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction

Ernest Hemingway has long been regarded as a fiercely heterosexual writer who advocated and embodied an exaggerated masculinity. This witty and intelligent book, the first to focus exclusively on gender in Hemingway's writing, presents a new view of the author, demonstrating that issues of gender and sexuality are more complex and subtle in his work than has ever been imagined.Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes reread the Hemingway Text—his published and unpublished writing and what is known about his life—and show that gender was one of his conscious preoccupations. They explore the anguish and uncertainty beneath the blunt facade of Papa Hemingway; they examine a range of Hemingway's fictional women in such works as The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls and suggest that his best representations of women take on attributes of gender commonly viewed as male; they discuss how lesbianism, sex changes, and miscegenation appear in Hemingway's early and late writing; and they analyze examples of homosexual desire among boys and men in Hemingway's stories of bullfighters and soldiers. Offering new readings of familiar and previously unknown Hemingway texts, this book will change the way this author is read and evaluated.

A reconsideration of the all-too-neat assumptions we make about modernism in art and literatureIn this lively, personal book, Robert Scholes intervenes in ongoing discussions about modernism in the arts during the crucial half-century from 1895 to 1945. While critics of and apologists for modernism have defined modern art and literature in terms of binary oppositions—high/low, old/new, hard/soft, poetry/rhetoric—Scholes contends that these distinctions are in fact confused and misleading. Such oppositions are instances of “paradoxy”—an apparent clarity that covers real confusion.Closely examining specific literary texts, drawings, critical writings, and memoirs, Scholes seeks to complicate the neat polar oppositions attributed to modernism. He argues for the rehabilitation of works in the middle ground that have been trivialized in previous evaluations, and he fights orthodoxy with such paradoxes as “durable fluff,” “formulaic creativity,” and “iridescent mediocrity.” The book reconsiders major figures like James Joyce while underscoring the value of minor figures and addressing new attention to others rarely studied. It includes twenty-two illustrations of the artworks discussed. Filled with the observations of a personable and witty guide, this is a book that opens up for a reader’s delight the rich cultural terrain of modernism.

“I believe that it is in our interest as individuals to become crafty readers, and in the interest of the nation to educate citizens in the craft of reading. The craft, not the art. . . . This book is about that craft.”—from the IntroductionThis latest book from the well-known literary critic Robert Scholes presents his thoughtful exploration of the craft of reading. He deals with reading not as an art or performance given by a virtuoso reader, but as a craft that can be studied, taught, and learned. Those who master the craft of reading, Scholes contends, will justifiably take responsibility for the readings they produce and the texts they choose to read.Scholes begins with a critique of the New Critical way of reading (“bad for poets and poetry and really terrible for students and teachers of poetry”), using examples of poems by various writers, in particular Edna St. Vincent Millay. He concludes with a consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of the fundamentalist way of reading texts regarded as sacred.To explain and clarify the approach of the crafty reader, the author analyzes a wide-ranging selection of texts by figures at the margins of the literary and cultural canon, including Norman Rockwell, Anaïs Nin, Dashiell Hammett, and J. K. Rowling. Throughout his discussion Scholes emphasizes how concepts of genre affect the reading process and how they may work to exclude certain texts from the cultural canon and curriculum.

Traces the controversial poet's thinking about teaching and learning throughout his career.Once described by T. S. Eliot as "first and foremost, a teacher and campaigner," Ezra Pound has received no shortage of critical attention. Super Schoolmaster suggests that Pound still has quite a bit to teach readers in the twenty-first century, particularly amid increasing threats to the humanities and higher education. Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre illuminate Pound's contradictory career of innovative poetics and reactionary politics by following his extensive thinking about teaching and learning within and beyond the academy. Given how scornful Pound could be of institutionalized schooling, the book's title may feel like a misnomer; however, Super Schoolmaster makes clear how wholeheartedly this modernist icon believed in the importance and vitality of learning. Pound's brief flirtation with becoming a professional academic ended early on, but his entire life's work can be seen as an immense pedagogical lesson, promoting a living, breathing culture tied to the very fabric of contemporary life. Not to ignore his critics, who have taught the necessity of reading against Pound, Scholes and Ben-Merre propose that to reread Pound now is to celebrate the joy of learning while always remaining mindful of the ultimate perils of his example.

Traces the controversial poet's thinking about teaching and learning throughout his career.Once described by T. S. Eliot as "first and foremost, a teacher and campaigner," Ezra Pound has received no shortage of critical attention. Super Schoolmaster suggests that Pound still has quite a bit to teach readers in the twenty-first century, particularly amid increasing threats to the humanities and higher education. Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre illuminate Pound's contradictory career of innovative poetics and reactionary politics by following his extensive thinking about teaching and learning within and beyond the academy. Given how scornful Pound could be of institutionalized schooling, the book's title may feel like a misnomer; however, Super Schoolmaster makes clear how wholeheartedly this modernist icon believed in the importance and vitality of learning. Pound's brief flirtation with becoming a professional academic ended early on, but his entire life's work can be seen as an immense pedagogical lesson, promoting a living, breathing culture tied to the very fabric of contemporary life. Not to ignore his critics, who have taught the necessity of reading against Pound, Scholes and Ben-Merre propose that to reread Pound now is to celebrate the joy of learning while always remaining mindful of the ultimate perils of his example.