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

[Dr. Virago]

Meg -- never mind, I just saw your convincing comment at New Kid's.

[Matt]

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.

Amen to that. Fuck scholarly edifice, dude. Seriously.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Craig: "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."

I wonder who Craig is imagining in this "average student" category, and who he is imagining that Scott's list of introductions is for. Someone should ask Noah Cicero about it.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Matt, I know how much you value purism and the unadulterated experience . . . but Rich is correct. One cannot simply jump into something, no matter how open-minded or intelligent one is. (And invoking Noah reminds me I need to add some categories for existential thought.) Not everyone of the requisite intelligence to understand a work or possessing the desire to do so has the luxury of even a "passing" familiarity with the philosophical tradition. They may have heard a name or been intrigued by an idea and want to follow up on it. You send them directly to the source texts and, well, you'll induce them to run screaming; to say otherwise smacks of elitism to me. Then again, I'm in good company: as I've mentioned before, Derrida said he liked his comic book better than Norris.

However, I don't want to derail this conversation, which when combined with this one may lead to more fleshing out of the list. Sorry if I police here, but I'm earnestly eager to see this thread through; I'm more than happy to start another to continue this conversation, though.

[Laura]

Minus the swears, I agree with Matt, sort of: what's a better use of my painfully limited time - reading an introduction to Australian literature, or some Australian literature?

[jholbo]

New category: Pastoral. Not sure what the best book would be.

[Click HERE to read an updated version of the list. - The Management]

[minnesotaj]

John... but we all KNOW you're partial to a certain book on Pastoral!

As to this, American Modernist might be Kenner's "The Pound Era," I'll second Matthiessen's "American Renaissance" & Abrams' "Mirror and the Lamp," American Civil War would easily be Edmund Wilson's "Patriotic Gore," Renaissance literature gets a pretty good working over in Curtius' "European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages."

A few people, however, have pointed out that sticking to primary literature is the best way. I confess I have some symptathy for this view. At Minnesota, where I studied philosophy, I don't know if I remember a course in Philosophy in which we had a "textbook" until I got to the senior/graduate level (and that was for things like Vlastos, Irwin, et.al., on Plato). I think my intro to philosophy course readings were something like Austin's "How to do things with words," Wittgenstein's "Blue and the Brown Books," and similar stuff--and I remember very well that the intro to Political Philosophy was Rawls, Nozick and Walzer. He sounds like kind of a dick when he says it, but the mathematician Abel's remark on his early success, "It was easy-I read the masters and not their pupils," has some good sense to it.

[minnesotaj]

Also--just looking at this list gives me vertigo.

[minnesotaj]

Also, also... for The Metaphysical Poets: I have no idea whether it's been surpassed/outdated, but I really liked Joan Bennett's "Five Metaphysical Poets."

[mmf!]

why - WHY - do you consider "Realist" to refer to American literature instead of French, and in particular to Flaubert, as it so obviously should? (given the choice of that Amy Kaplan book)

Also, WHY do you have categories for "British Modernist," "American Modernist," and "Irish Modernist," but none for writers in other langauges?

If you are going to include Gadamer, Russian Formalists, and so on whose philosophy & critical theory have influenced yours, what possible justification is there for excluding novelists and literary figures who don't happen to write in English?

If you're talking about modernism and you can't include secondary material "introductions" that discuss Rilke, Musil, Flaubert, or Baudelaire, BAUDELAIRE, then I have no idea what on earth you are talking about here. You're probably going to leave Voltaire and Goethe out of the Enlightenment too.

[mmf!]

Also, this: "One cannot simply jump into something, no matter how open-minded or intelligent one is" is incorrect. There is a value in opening oneself up to the work and making room for a certain amount of disorientation, of being taken over by the work, although it's not a substitution for more secondary reading later.

[Wax Banks]

Marvelous thread, Scott! I'm with whoever said that the list is vertigo-inducing: my Christmas list just sprouted a second head and third arm and is threatening to steal a golden spaceship and...er...

Moving on: I still don't get what people have against the Eagleton book as a lit. theory intro. I'll happily cede that it's not comprehensive, and that it surely favours certain modes of reading in line with Eagleton's own vibe, but if we assume that the purpose of each of these introductory texts is to give a sense of the field of study, point sensibly to other texts, and inspire further study, the Eagleton seems a perfect choice. Maddening and exciting in equal measure - like getting a tour of Paris from a crotchety old man who ends the evening by pointing you toward the best café in the city and then picking your pocket.

For deconstructive criticism, how is Julian Wolfreys thought of? He has a brilliant little book, Deconstruction * Derrida, intended as an intro to Derrida's thought in particular, that's considerably more lucid and enjoyable than any other deconstructive criticism I've read. Mannered and too clever by half like any self-identified deconstructionist criticism, but genuinely pleasurable reading.

I second (third? fifth?) Massumi for 'rhizomatic', though I'm not convinced it's worth the trouble.

For Bloomian: why not The Western Canon? Jargon-free, wide-ranging to the point of lunacy, irritating (the chapter on Joyce is beautiful but makes me want to bludgeon the man with the Finnegans Wake annotations), in places lyrical and lovely. I suppose I'm implying by this suggestion that the formal structure of Bloom's thought can be arrived at later by someone who actually cares; the sweep of his vision of literary history comes through quite nicely in his big popular books. The Shakespeare book is more focused and right in his wheelhouse. Alternatively there's A Map of Misreading, which is digestible and (as I recall) places fewer burdens on the reader than Anxiety, but again: is the general shape of his thought more relevant than the particulars of his 'analytical method'?

What about hypertext etc.? Landow would be a first-order choice. And narratology?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

MMF!, this list is provisional, and if you read through the comments, you'll see that I specifically mention that I'm more than happy to expand it. As to why I considered Realism to refer to American realism instead of French, well, that reflects my own personal bias as an Americanist; which is the reason this is a distributed intellegence project. So calm down, alright? I'll add French realism, as well as any others, with the next update. (And for the record, any respectable book on American realism and naturalism will discuss its Zolaistic origins. But you're right, there need to be more categories.)

Wax Banks, rhizomatic needs to be there because, well, it's something we're expected to be familiar with. I haven't read the Wolfreys, but I'll take a look at it when I hit the library today. Do you think The Western Canon representative enough of both the general shape of his thought and his method? From what I remember, his popular stuff usually downplays the analytic in favor of the, um, glowing? And yes, hypertext and narratology need adding. The original list really does reveal my scholarly blindspots, doesn't it?

[Jon]

"rhizomatic needs to be there because, well, it's something we're expected to be familiar with."

I hear the sound of goalposts moving, Scott. :)

If it's "familiarity" you want, the ability to keep up your end of a dinner party conversation or (no more or less respectably) to avoid looking stupid in facing conference panel questions... then it's a whole 'nother story.

On similar lines, someone should write a version of 1066 and All That for literary criticism. I'm aware that it's been attempted, but no versions that I've seen have been any good.

So just as history is no more than "all you can remember," so literary criticism is all that you think other people believe you should know, plus one extra fact just to surprise them.

So for "rhizomatic," you need a vague idea of the difference between rhizome and arborescent, the ability to look the phrases "body without organs" and "line of flight" in the eye without blinking, studied references to "minor literature" when dealing with African American or postcolonial lit, and a weather eye for the chance to drop the comment "Did you know Deleuze also wrote a book for children?"

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I didn't mean "dinner party" familiarity; more like "job talk" familiarity, i.e. the ability to demonstrate that you've wrestled with the ideas people in a given field think worth wrestling with. I mean, I know that much about Deleuze. (Full disclosure: As an undergraduate I took a graduate seminar on D&G with this fellow, so I'm much more familiar with Deleuze than the average future-English prof.) What I mean is, let me see now, what I mean is that in an ideal world I'd have engaged with all 700 sub-disciplines in a substantial fashion if by "substantial" I can count reading an introductory text acknowledged by experts to be the best one around.

[Craig]

I didn't mean "dinner party" familiarity; more like "job talk" familiarity, i.e. the ability to demonstrate that you've wrestled with the ideas people in a given field think worth wrestling with.

The goal posts are moving again! I recall being poo-pooed at for suggesting that 'students' should be moderately familiar with idealism, phenomenology and Nietzsche before coming to Foucault... I thought this was reasonable for a third or fourth year undergrad! Now we're talking about 'job talk' familiarity?! I should anyone hoping to field questions on 'theory' (be it social, political, cultural, or literary) should have this knowledge already. Don't we have coursework anymore? Don't we do comprehensives anymore?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Three exclamation points overlapping with three rhetorical question marks -- he's got you now, Scott. How dare you write that sentence.

[minnesotaj]

Scott -

I'm puzzled. As someone who is not and never will be interviewed for an English Department job, but who's spent a fair amount of time in them as a visiting writer, I wonder: Is it really the case that you'd be expected to know that much outside your specialty? I was having drinks with the members of an English Department when Hugh Kenner passed away & effused about The Pound Era & was asked, by the chair, "Oh? What's your interest in Kenner?" There was a rather sharp, skeptical tone to his voice, so I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that he was asking in the manner of, "Why would you read that if you weren't a Modernist?"

I think this list you're putting together is a great idea (and would love to see it get enough traffic that you could put together a kind of weighted second and third choice for each category, too)--but I can't imagine anyone would expect anything like more than cursory knowledge of that entire list. Or would they?

[Matt]

I don't see much pertaining to visual culture here . . . I would nominate Alan Trachtenberg's _Reading American Photographs_ for a good introduction to photography in America.

[David]

On the Victorian period: "The Victorian Frame of Mind" by Walter Houghton. Hands-down the best-written, finely sectioned and easy-to-use guide to the social, political, philosophical, and religious attitudes and changes that occurred during the period.

On the British Romantics, I second: M.H. Abrams, "Mirror and the Lamp," gets it.