Call for Papers

Current Issue

Subscription Information

Submission Information

Archives

Editorial Staff

Editorial Board

Back Issue Order Form

English Department at NIU

Northern Illinois University

David Gorman
"Tzvetan Todorov: An Anglo-French Checklist to 1995"
 

Anthony G. Medici
"The Restless Ghost of the New Criticism"
 

Brett Zimmerman
"A Catalogue of Rhetorical and Other Literary Terms from American Literature and Oratory"

David Gorman, "Tzvetan Todorov: An Anglo-French Checklist to 1995" / 702
An enumerative listing of publications by Tzvetan Todorov (b. 1939) from 1965 to 1995 includes both original French publications and English translations.
back to top

Anthony G. Medici, "The Restless Ghost of the New Criticism" / 760
New Criticism appears to have survived a generation of attacks by Structuralists, Deconstructionists, New Historicists, and a multiplicity of socially-engaged criticisms, and its influence now appears to be on the rise amongst contemporary critics. A collection of critical essays edited by William J. Spurlin and Michael Fischer, The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities, seeks, as its title indicates, to demonstrate some of the ways in which New Critical theory and praxis have found a place in the work of contemporary critics. The collection is divided into three parts. The first contains several exemplary New Critical works by a number of early New Critics. The essays in the second section explore some of the more problematic aspects New Criticism poses for later critics. The essays in the last section  demonstrate how critics engaged in such fields as Lesbian criticism, New Black Aesthetic, and classroom practice have been able to draw upon New Critical tenets and practices even as these critics grapple with some of New Criticism's more troublesome aspects. Either explicitly or implicitly, a number of the essays point to the importance of pedagogical practice to theoretical development and particularly to the exemplary ability of New Criticism to fuse literary theory with a classroom practice that in the long run might be its most enduring legacy.
back to top

Brett Zimmerman, "A Catalogue of Rhetorical and Other Literary Terms from American Literature and Oratory" / 730
This prospectus from the unpublished textbook An Introduction to Style in American Literature and Oratory contains excerpts from the introduction and the catalogue of literary terms. Some rhetors who have catalogued classical tropes and schemes have chosen their illustrations almost solely from Greek, Roman, or British sources; others demonstrate that rhetoric is still very much employed in our time by quoting various twentieth-century figures. The typical Arts undergraduate, however, might get the impression that rhetoric is something that concerned the ancients and the British but was neglected on the other side of the Atlantic—that Americans, for instance, were so concerned with founding a political utopia, taming the wilderness, settling the land, establishing businesses, and making a buck, that the tradition of stylistic eloquence had no place in so pragmatic a culture. Less naive undergraduates may have heard of some legendary orators—Daniel Webster, Clarence Darrow—or may know something about the speeches of Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King from a sociohistorical point of view. Senior undergraduates and graduate students may also be aware of detailed stylistic studies of specific American authors—may know, for example, that more has been done with Hemingway, James, and Melville; that relatively little has been done with Poe. Still, we need an introductory text that provides a survey of American speeches and prose works and that is dedicated to exploring the stylistic qualities of those readings; we can thus see that the tradition of classical rhetoric has also been integral to American culture and literature, right from the early Puritans until our own time.
back to top