Temporary Comment Section for "The Best Introduction To . . . "

Updated!

[Please see this post for the updated version of the list.]

It all started when I was an undergraduate.  One morning I woke up and decided to read a general history of every single American state. I made it through four or five before tiring of the genre.  At the time I wish I had a list of the best history of each state.  I asked a history professor of mine if such a list existed and was informed that not only did no list exist, but that the labor required to create one would boggled his imagination.  Needless to say, all of this happened when the WWW was in its infancy and blogs but a twinkle in its eye.  I thought perhaps I could cull a decent one from Wikipedia entries, but a cursory examination of topics upon which I have some expertise revealed that those references are of dubious quality.  Then I thought: I can start a movement.  So I sent Ralph an email about the state history project.  (About ten minutes ago.  Some nerve he has, not replying yet.)  But I can start a little something here.

My choice of both category and best book concerning it is intended as a way to begin the discussion.  I can only work with what I've read.  (Some areas I've read around in but can't think of a qualifier for "best introduction.")  This project has the possibility to demonstrate the real strength of the distributive intelligence review process.  Please suggest additional categories and alternative selections, as my list is no way authoritative or exhaustive.  I also want to avoid "representative" works, i.e. the best introduction to psychoanalysis being The Interpretation of Dreams.  I want books which cover a wider swath than a single work by a representative figure can. 

Note: All categories and/or periods contain all the problems inherent to categorization and periodization.  I also imagine that there must be a better way to organize this list, as this somewhat chronological organization seems unwieldy.  I expect many edits to both the body of this post and the substance of the list.

Literature or Literary Theory:

• Homeric: The Best of the Achaeans, Gregory Nagy
  
• Presocratic:
  
• Aristotelian:
• Platonic: Images of Excellence, Christopher Janaway
• Horatian:
• Augustinian:
• Patristic:
• Anglo-Saxon:
• Early Medieval:
• Twelfth Century Renaissance: The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200, C. Stephen Jaeger
• Medieval: The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, David Wallace, ed.
• Late Medieval: Hochon's Arrow, Paul Strohm
• Italian Renaissance:
• Early Modern:
• English Renaissance: Renaissance Self-Fashioning : From More to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt
• Elizabethan:
• Jacobean:
• Caroline:
• Commonwealth Period: Writing the English Republic : Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660, David Norbrook
• Metaphyiscal Poetry:
• Neoclassical:
• Enlightenment:
• Age of Johnson:
• Early American:
• Captivity Narratives:
• Restoration:
• Augustun:
• Revolutionary American: Revolution and the Word, Cathy Davidson
• Romantic:
• Gothic:
• Picaresque:
• Antebellum American:
• Pre-Raphaelite:
• Victorian: The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter Houghton
  
• American Civil War: Patriotic Gore: Studies in the American Civil War, Edmund Wilson
• Slave Narratives: To Wake The Nations, Eric Sundquist
• American Renaissance: Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination n the Age of Emerson and Melville,  David S. Reynolds
  
• Transcendalist:
• Domestic Fiction:Domestic Individualism, Gillian Brown
• Sentimental: Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins
• Aestheticism and Decadence:
• Realist: The Social Construction of American Realism, Amy Kaplan
• Naturalist:
• American Modernist:
• British Modernist:
• Irish Modernist:
• Vorticist:
• Futurist:
• Russian Formalism:
• 1922: Reading 1922: Return to the  Scene of the Modern, Michael North
• The Jazz Age: Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas
• The Harlem Renaissance:
• Social Realist:
• The Beats:
• The New York Intellectuals: The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930'2 to the 1980's Alan Wald
• Southern Agrarian: The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism, Mark Jancovich
• New Criticism: The New Apologists for Poetry, Murray Krieger
• Phenomenological: Truth and Method, Hans-George Gadamer
• Geneva School: Critics of Consciousness, Sarah Lawall
• Structuralism: Structuralist Poetics, Jonathan Culler
• French Structuralism: History of Structuralism I & II, Francoise Dosse
• Freudian Psychoanalytic:
• Lacanian Psychoanalytic: Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, Shoshana Felman
• Bloomian:
• Post-Structural:
• Deconstructive: Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction, Vincent Leitch
• Marxist: Considerations on Western Marxism, Perry Anderson
• Frankfurt School: The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay
• Rhizomatic: A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi
• Semiotic:
• Reception Theory:
• Reader-Response Theory: Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction, Steven Mailloux
• Foucauldian: Saint Foucault, David Halperin
• First-Wave Feminist:
• Second-Wave Feminist: Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory, Jane Gallop
• Third-Wave Feminist:
• Post-Colonial:
• New Historicist: New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics, Brook Thomas
• Cultural Studies:
• Gender Studies:
• Queer Theory: Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• African American:
• Asian American: Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong
• Chicano/Chicana: Chicano Narratives: The Dialectics of Difference, Ramon Saldivar
• Posthuman:

Additional Categories:

• Pastoral:
• Analytic:
• Existential:
• Settler Australian:
• Visual Culture: Reading American Photographs, Alan Trachtenberg
• New Americanist: The Futures of American Studies, Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds.
• French Realism:
• French Naturalism:

Comments

[Craig]

Scott: Dreyfus and Rabinow is the best 'philosophical' introduction; Eribon and Macey are the most comprehensive in the sense that they combine biography with the development of the ideas Foucault was working on; Han is the best in terms of 'Foucault as critical theory'. Deleuze is the most idiosyncratic and is, thus, not particularly faithful to Foucault, but important for Foucault the same way the Spinoza book was important for Spinoza. Isn't the Halperin book more about queer theory and Foucault than on Foucault himself?

But, following Jon's point about intros, the best way into Foucault is to read the Order of Things. If you still insist on an introduction, though, Dreyfus andd Rabinow is likely the best.

[Rodney Herring]

Scott, I guess I'm revealing my own sensibilities in recommending the Howard, but it's such a thorough study, and it instantiates the Political Unconscious so much better than The Political Unconscious does (but of course the intent of the latter is rather to theorize the political unconscious...). And I think most people who write about naturalism read it and make a nod to it.

And yeah, I think the Thomas is pretty damn cool, but I shouldn't have forgotten Amy Kaplan's study, The Social Construction of American Realism.

An addition:
For Early American, everyone reads and cites (which she basically announces in her intro to the revised edition) Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word

Matthiessen: Well, as he basically inaugurated American Literature as a discipline and then determined how most departments still view and teach 19th century American lit (as though nothing happens between Whitman and modernism), I think American Renaissance is a fascinating historical text. (And insofar as Matthiessen has even determined the name of your category American Renaissance, it's hard to see what would be more illustrative than his study.) On the other hand, if you want an introduction to the problematization of Matthiessen's lasting influence -- or one that even looks at American Renaissance as a historical text -- then you might list something like
Michael J. Colacurcio “The American-Renaissance Renaissance” New England Quarterly 64 (1991) 445-92; or
Eric Cheyfitz “Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution” American Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2. (Jun., 1989) 341-61;
if not, Jay Grossman's Reconstituting">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822331160/">Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Craig, I suppose one reason I insist on an introduction--or, perhaps better put, "overview"--is that if one reads The Order of Things one won't acquire any sort of understanding of late Foucauldian thought, only early and/or mid-transitional (depending on how complete you think the early/late break to be). Does that make sense? Yes, the Halperin book focuses on queer theory and, well, hagiography; but it introduces his thought in shifting context (if I remember correctly). Like I said though, I'm by no means wedded to it, and am inclined to shift it to the Dreyfus/Rabinow.

Laura, the problem with that is that you won't get any of the context, just the bald thought. I suppose that's why I'm reluctant to work with the "representative text" logic that governs The Norton. Without knowing what New Critical thought emerges from, it's impossible to understand its significance; e.g. if one doesn't know about the Southern Agranian element to it, one is liable to take their claims about irony and ambiguity at face-value, instead of seeing them as the humanizing, anti-technocratic forces the NCs thought them to be.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

We cross-commented there, Rodney. Yes, the Kaplan's brilliant, and probably ought to be the one. Same with the Davidson. (I hope everyone else can appreciate the difficulty of sitting down and making this kind of determination; I keep scanning my shelves, but many of these books I don't own, &c.) And I think some combination of AR and the Colacurcio would work brilliantly...maybe that's the way to get around the "representative text fallacy" mentioned above. In the case where a representative text is the best introduction, offer up an essay that contextualizes it. It's evolution, baby!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Laura pointed out on the Valve that this list is heavily American/British oriented. Thing is, I don't know the periodization scheme of, say, Australian/Indian/Italian/French/German/Russian literature &c. This is why the distributed nature of the distributed intelligence review is so key, no? Any suggestions along those lines will be greatly appreciated.

[Craig]

Scott: in terms of literary theory, where Foucault usually works in as a 'queer theorist' or 'new historicist' (though I'm not sure why on either account!), the Halperin might be better in that 'limited' regard (i.e, Foucault and literary studies). As a comprehensive to Foucault's thought as opposed to 'uses of Foucault', Dreyfus and Rabinow is likely the best. (Although Dreyfus has since rescinded some of the claims he made about Foucault in that period -- see his essay in "Foucault and Heidegger".)

I'm likely in the minority, but I think 'everything is there' in "Order of Things", or, rather, that the later work is largely an elaboration of the "Order of Things", that is, to present through 'the death of Man' a post-representational philosophy. In fact, I know I'm in the minority. (Might just be me and Stuart Elden in that boat.)

[Josh]

If you were to divide Foucault into early and late, Saint Foucault would be very important for the latter. But, indispensible as it is for its refutation of widely circulated canards against him, it really only covers (albeit very well) the thought of his last few years.

Although it's a "representative" text, it'd be hard to avoid Epistemology of the Closet for queer theory. It's so necessary.

More tentatively, I'd suggest Hugh Kenner for Irish Modernism and David S. Reynolds for American Renaissance.

Great request, generating great conversation.

[Jon]

C'mon, Craig, starting someone out on The Order of Things would be madness, sheer madness. Either Discipline and Punish or The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, surely.

[Craig]

Jon - I'd like to imagine that students and other interested parties would have some background in the preceeding two thousand and five hundreds years of thought before turning to texts written in the past fifty-odd years!

And, as I indicated: I'm likely in the minority who believes that there isn't a disjunction between the early and the middle & late works... (If there is a break, it occurs after the "Birth of Biopolitics" lectures immediately before the eighties.) Consequently, I do think that "Order of Things" is the best introduction to Foucault. It certainly isn't an introductory text, but it is the best introduction. I'd strongly insist that "Discipline and Punish" and "HSI" can't be understood without reference to the "Order of Things" -- the whole point of D&P and HSI is to realize philosophy after the "death of man"; that is, these works aren't an elaboration on the idea, but take it as the point of departure. Especially the attempt to articulate a "microphysics" or "analytics" of power!

I also think there is pedagogical value in reading texts that you can't actually understand or, perhaps, that you aren't yet ready to understand.

[Hissy Cat]

To follow up on the commenter who bemoaned that de Saussure is not often taught, I'm a recent graduate and I read the General Course in Linguistics about elevendy hundred times in my college career.

I wasn't, however, introduced to Wittgenstein until the professor of my honors seminar had us read The Blue and Brown Books. I'm pretty sure we read Wittgenstein immedeately following de Saussure (the honors seminar was all critical theory). Reading one after the other made total sense. Of course, I have no idea what category you would put Wittgenstein in for the purposes of your reading list or if he belongs there at all or whatever, but reading Wittgenstein was one of the most useful things I did in my major and was probably the most altering intellectual experience I had, too. I have no idea why I was not introduced to his writings earlier.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

H.C., I do need to add a category for analytic philosophy--and a couple of branches at that--but I'm waiting to hear back from the likes of analytic philosophers like Holbo to figure out what exactly they should be.

Craig--to thread-hop a bit--I think there's a value to not assuming someone's familiar with 2,500 yrs. of intellectual history in a solid introductory text. Otherwise, you'll have people punting distinctions between, say, early/archeological/genealogical/late Foucault. And while there is pedagogical value to confusion, it's not quite what I'm going to for here, as noted above in the Culler vs. re-re-re-re-re-re-reading Of Grammatology. I should rephrase that and say "there are different pedagogical values, and I'm aiming for the first."

[Dr. Virago]

Scott, a couple of questions:

Are you looking for monographs rather than essay collections or "guides to..."?

Are you just thinking of English lit? If so, you really don't need the 12th c. Renaissance category.

For some reason all I can think of in my own period (late medieval) are narrower works -- ones on specific sets of texts or authors or genres or what have you. I'm having trouble thinking of something broad enough. I'll get back to you if I think of something.

From the perspective of someone who *isn't* an Anglo-Saxonist but who teaches the literature, I really like Andy Orchard's Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript. Even though it sounds really focused, it is actually gives a good introduction to the wide range of cultural and textual influences of late Anglo-Saxon literary culture.

[Craig]

Scott: point taken, but I'd like to imagine that the average student would have at least been exposed to German Idealism, Nietzsche and phenomenology before getting to Foucault. A little structuralist anthropology wouldn't hurt either, but it isn't entirely necessary. Similarly, I'd like to think that students would have been exposed to Hume, Descartes and Leibniz before getting to Kant. A well-structured and coherent curriculum would go a long way towards facilitating this.

Nonetheless, I maintain that a little suffering, pain and confusion goes a long way towards understanding a text.

[meg]

Having been shooed over here by New Kid, I'll defend the 12C Renaissance -- it does deserve its own category, yea, even unto Englalond.

Medieval: Thorlac Turville-Peters' *England the Nation*. Brian Stock's *Implications of Literacy*

12C Ren: Stephen Jaeger's *Envy of Angels*. Peter Dronke's *Medieval Lyric*.

[La Lecturess]

Renaissance lit: must-reads include Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Fish's Self-Consuming Artifacts. The best introduction to textual and history-of-the-book issues in the period is Love's Culture and Commerce of Texts.

[meg]

La Lecturess: Do you really prefer Love over Adrian Johns's *Nature of the Book*?

Actually, now that I think about it, surely Eliz. Eisenstein's *Printing Press as Agent of Change* belongs there too.

[Rachel]

Two books by David Norbrook deserve strong consideration.

One is debatable, the other I think not. For Elizabethan, the revised edition of his Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance is a classic and difficult to beat. For the Commonwealth period, nothing even comes close to Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660

[La Lecturess]

Ooh, Eisenstein, definitely. As for Love & Johns--well, I read Love first and it's what I refer to most often, so perhaps I'm biased for that reason.

[Dr. Virago]

Meg -- Really? I guess the *influence* of the 12th c. renaissance is important "even unto Engalond" (heh heh), but does it really deserve a category all its own? But what do I know -- I'm a late medieval person.

[Dr. Virago]

Oh and thought of a book for late/medieval which also serves as a good primer on theory and the medieval -- Jesse Gellrich's The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages.

For devotional literary and cultural practices in late medieval England, nothing beats Gail McMurray Gibson's The Theater of Devotion even though it concentrates on East Anglia.