Krieger's classic study strips the cloak of empirical seriousness from the practice of literary criticism, emphasizing the critic's (and readers') engagement with the texts at hand.

The Play and Place of Criticism

Business & Money

Krieger, Professor Murray

Economics

The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Hardcover with dust jacket. Good vintage condition.

Words About Words About Words: Theory, Criticism, and the Literary Text

"Since he published his wonderful 1967 essay on ekphrasis, or the literary depiction of visual art, Krieger has been wrestling with the larger implications of the genre for a theory of how it manifests itself. In this thoughtful and thought-provoking book, he forcefully grapples with the ancient paradox that words in time can seem to create images in space....This work of abundant intelligence patiently unfolds the many puzzles and contradictions of ekphrasis, from the shield of Achilles to post-modernism."--Virginia Quarterly Review.
What, in apparently pictorial poetry, do words--can words--represent? Conversely, how can words in a poem be picturable? After decades of reading and thinking about the nature and function of literary representation, Murray Krieger here develops his most systematic theoretical statement out of answers to such questions. Ekphrasis is his account of the continuing debates over meaning in language from Plato to the present. Krieger sees the modernist position as the logical outcome of these debates but argues that more recent theories radically question the political and aesthetic assumptions of the modernists and the 2,000-year tradition they claim to culminate.
Krieger focuses on ekphrasis--the literary representation of visual art, real or imaginary--a form at least as old as its most famous example, the shield of Achilles verbally invented in the Iliad. Heargues that the "ekphrastic principle" has remained enduringly problematic in that it reflects the resistant paradoxes of representation in words. As he examines the conflict between spatial and temporal, between vision-centered and word-centered metaphors, Krieger reveals how literary theory has been shaped by the attempts and the deceptive failures of language to do the job of the "natural sign."

Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign

The Institution of Theory

During at least the past decade, violent controversy in what has become known as the "human sciences" has been generated, as perhaps never before, by the increasingly aggressive role played by theory. Murray Krieger was one of those largely instrumental in moving theory into that role. In The Institution of Theory, he examines, at once sympathetically and critically, the process by which theory has become institutionalized in the American academy and the consequences of theory as an academic institution. He traces the transformation of literary theory into critical theory and relates it to changes in the place of literature within questions about discourse at large. And he faces the costs as well as the gains of the recent denial of privilege to the literary. What, he asks, is the future of the languages of the humanities now that criticism, no longer just one of several literary activities, makes its all-encompassing claims as an imperializing institution?To support his view of the issues at stake in current theoreticaldebate, Krieger surveys both the history of American criticism and the general history of theory in the West. He sees divisions in each of them that foreshadow the current debates: in the first a conflict between the social and the aesthetic functions of literature, and in the second a conflict between the treatment of literature as a reflection of a culture's ideology and the treatment of literature as a subversion of that ideology. To what extent, he asks, are our debates new and to what extent are they merely refashioned versions of those we have always had with us?Recent years have seen an ugly polarization of almost all discourse concerning the humanities, as even moderate statements have been charged with being representative of one extreme or the other. Despite this risk, Krieger has added his own moderate voice, in hopes of attracting a balanced response that would encourage the expansion of the range of texts for study, together with an expansion into the political of our ways of studying them, while still recognizing and responding to the special powers of the literary to open our culture to such expansions.

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Books by Krieger, Professor Murray

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Krieger, Professor Murray. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Play and Place of Criticism

The Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System

The Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System

Words About Words About Words: Theory, Criticism, and the Literary Text

Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign

The Institution of Theory

The Institution of Theory