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Poetry & Stories: Primer on Litcrit

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New Critics, Feminists
Phenomenology;
Reader-Response critics
Need no apology.

There are Formalists of Russia,
Structuralists of France.
Give Archetypal Critics
More than a glance.

Marxists are strange birds,
Like Speech-Act Theorists.
And yet there’s no doubt
Which theory is Queerest.

Diaologic critics
And Deconstruction
Both in their own way
Love textual combustion.

There are some books -
Aristotle’s Poetics
Horace and others -
That privilege rhetorics.

Samuel Johnson,
Cleanth Brooks,
Robert Penn Warren,
All wrote books

T. S. Eliot
And Wayne Booth,
Mikhail Bakhtin
Search for truth.

Harold Bloom
Likes his Freud.
Without Oedipal complexes
He’d be unemployed.

New Historicists
And Post-Colonials
Spy out injustice
And acts felonial.

Both Stanley Fish
And Northrup Frye
For subtleties
Have a keen eye.

Roman Ingarden
Is a critic pure;
Jacques Derrida
Is not Saussure.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, February 13, 2006 at 8:47 am

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Poetry & Stories: Primer on Litcrit

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