What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWhat is Literature?
Jean-Paul Sartre · 280 pages
Sartre argues for literature as a form of liberation in this classic and influential exposition of his existentialist philosophy. He examines the nature of writing, why people write, and for whom.
Of Grammatology
Jacques Derrida · 354 pages
Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of thei
Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952
Jorge Luis Borges · 205 pages
The Greek Way
Edith Hamilton · 327 pages
A study of the intellectual life of Greece at the peak of its achievements. The author interprets the literature, art, and philosophy of the Greeks and discusses what this heritage means to the world today.
The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle
Aristotle · 289 pages
Image-Music-Text
Roland Barthes · 220 pages
'Image-Music-Text' brings together major essays by Roland Barthes on the structural analysis of narrative and on issues in literary theory, on the semiotics of photograph and film, on the practice of music and voice. Throughout the volume runs a constant movement 'from work to text': an attention to the very 'grain' of signifying activity and the desire to follow -- in literature, image, film, son
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Walter Benjamin · 280 pages
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Fredric Jameson · 438 pages
This wide-ranging work seeks to crystallize a definition of postmodernism. The author looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from high art to low; from market ideology to architecture, from painting to punk; film, from video art to literature.
Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction
Catherine Belsey · 128 pages
Heretics
G.K. Chesterton · 160 pages
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London, England on the 29th of May, 1874. Though he considered himself a mere rollicking journalist, he was actually a prolific and gifted writer in virtually every area of literature. A man of strong opinions and enormously talented at defending them, his exuberant personality nevertheless allowed him to maintain warm friendships with people - such as George B
Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
A.O. Scott · 282 pages
"The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever. Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Sc
Marxism and Literature
Raymond Williams · 217 pages
This study examines the place of literature within Marxist cultural theory, and offers an assessment of the contributions of previous thinkers to Marxist literary theory.
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
Walter Kaufmann · 384 pages
How Proust Can Change Your Life
Alain de Botton · 203 pages
The starting point of How Proust Can Change Your Life is that a great novel can be nothing less than life-transforming. This is an unusual claim: our education system, while stressing that novels are highly worthwhile, rarely investigates why this is so. How Proust Can Change Your Life takes Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as the basis for a sustained investigation into the power and signif
What We See When We Read
Peter Mendelsund · 419 pages
"A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading--how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader. What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images
Russian Thinkers
Isaiah Berlin, Jason Ferrell · 312 pages
Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian Thinkers is his unique meditation on the impact that Russia's outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In addition to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he addresses in his most famous essay, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox,' Berlin considers the social and p
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 129 pages
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the m
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
Susan Buck-Morss · 493 pages
The Theatre of the Absurd
Martin Esslin · 443 pages
"In 1953 Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents - Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others - shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attent
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari · 104 pages

