Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory is a wide-ranging but accessible introduction that illuminates the field of theory through a variety of useful and relevant examples. Covering all key theories and theorists, this book looks at the relation of theory to form, discourses, subjectivity, and media

Evan Gottlieb is Professor of English at Oregon State University, USA.

Introduction

Structure of the book and some caveats

References

1. Forms

Matters of form in the twentieth century

Terry Eagleton: the Marxist critic as public intellectual

Fredric Jameson: committing to form and history

Franco Moretti: maps, graphs, and distant reading

Engaging with classic literature: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Engaging with contemporary literature: Ian McEwan's Atonement

Engaging with film and new media: Austen on the big screen

References

2. Discourses

Matters of discourse in modernity

Jean Baudrillard: prophet of the postmodern

Giorgio Agamben: a genealogy of biopolitics

Rey Chow: entangling ethnicity, visuality, and language

Engaging with classic literature: Emily Bront¿'s Wuthering Heights

Engaging with contemporary literature: Hari Kunzru's White Tears

Engaging with film and new media: Easy

References

3. Subjectivities and embodiments

The birth of the subject

Slavoj Žižek: theorizing with psychoanalysis and Marxism

Judith Butler: beyond gender performativity

Catherine Malabou: philosophy, plasticity, neuroscience

Engaging with classic literature: Daniel Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Engaging with contemporary literature: Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch

Engaging with film and new media: The Fall

References

4. Media, networks, machines

Toward our contemporary media moment

Jacques Rancière: aesthetics for everyone

Bruno Latour: from networks to modes of existence and beyond

N. Katherine Hayles: defining the posthuman

Engaging with classic literature: Bram Stoker's Dracula

Engaging with contemporary literature: Gwyneth Jones's Proof of Concept

Engaging with film and new media: Ryan Coogler's Black Panther

References

5. Animals, affects, objects, environments

We have never been human

Donna Haraway: cyborgs, companion species, Chthulucene

Sara Ahmed: affects, objects, and feminist killjoys

Timothy Morton: being ecological with object-oriented ontology

Engaging with classic literature: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Engaging with contemporary literature: Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation

Engaging with film and new media: Margaret Atwood's Angel Catbird

References