Reddit mentions: The best modern literary criticism books
We found 49 Reddit comments discussing the best modern literary criticism books. We ran sentiment analysis on each of these comments to determine how redditors feel about different products. We found 13 products and ranked them based on the amount of positive reactions they received. Here are the top 20.
1. Little Black Classics Box Set (Penguin Little Black Classics)
- Penguin Books
- You will receive with a secure packaging
- Compact for travelling
Features:
Specs:
Height | 20.5 Inches |
Length | 7.2 Inches |
Number of items | 80 |
Release date | November 2015 |
Weight | 10.4499112188 Pounds |
Width | 5.3 Inches |
2. Ernest Hemingway on Writing
- Scribner
Features:
Specs:
Height | 8.4375 Inches |
Length | 5.5 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | July 1999 |
Weight | 0.35053499658 Pounds |
Width | 0.4 Inches |
3. K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher
- Penguin Books
- You will receive with a secure packaging
- Compact for travelling
Features:
Specs:
Color | Navy |
Height | 9.16 inches |
Length | 6.13 inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | November 2018 |
Weight | 2.35 pounds |
Width | 2.25 inches |
4. The Trouble with Being Born
- Arcade Publishing
Features:
Specs:
Height | 8.25 Inches |
Length | 5.5 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | February 2013 |
Weight | 0.55 Pounds |
Width | 0.6 Inches |
5. Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien's Middle-earth
Used Book in Good Condition
Specs:
Height | 8.97 Inches |
Length | 5.98 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Weight | 0.7936641432 Pounds |
Width | 0.55 Inches |
6. Literary Criticism
- EASILY REPAIR TIRES: Repair punctured tubeless tires or fix a flat on most vehicles without removing the tire from the rim; Rasp tool quickly removes objects from tires, and insert needle adds tire plugs
- FAST AND EFFICIENT: Car emergency kit gets you back on the road without needing to use a spare tire; Emergency tire sealant can be used as adhesive to ensure that tire leaks and punctures are completely secure
- FLEXIBLE TIRE PATCH KIT: Flat tire kit repairs car, ATV, RV, lawnmower, wheelbarrow, and other tubeless tires; The ultimate tire plug repair kit for emergencies and quick car tire plugs
- HEAVY DUTY TOOLS: Tire repair kit with plugs includes a hardened steel rasp and insert needle for durability; T-handle design provides greater leverage and improved torque compared with similar kits for car tire patches
- INCLUDED IN PACKAGING: (5) 4 inch string tire repair plugs, rasp tool, insert needle tool, and rubber tire repair cement; Add-on tire repair plug sets sold separately: 26684 (30 pack) and 26685 (100 pack)
Features:
Specs:
Release date | May 2017 |
7. Joseph Conrad: The Complete Works
- SPECS: Clips to a cleaning rod of ¼” diameter or less
- EASE OF USE: Use a cleaning rod and 2 clamps to measure off overall cartridge length or seating depth
- VERSATILITY: Works on all rifles
- INCLUDES: 2 clamps
Features:
Specs:
Release date | October 2018 |
8. The Count of Monte Cristo ( Active TOC, Free Audiobook) (A to Z Classics)
- Penguin Books
- You will receive with a secure packaging
- Compact for travelling
Features:
Specs:
Release date | April 2018 |
9. Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature and the 1960s
- Constructed with tempered glass with beveled edges and heavy gauge steel with high gloss black finish ;
- Adjustable spike feet for uneven floor and to improve speaker performance and reduce sound distortion;
- Included soft pad for added security to the speaker;
- Built in wire management system; Included spike feet cover for hardwood floor protection;
- RTA design, easy to assemble.
- Sold as pair.
- Dimensions: 24″ H x 9.5″ W x 11.8″ D
Features:
Specs:
Height | 6.3 Inches |
Length | 9.3 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Weight | 1.03176338616 Pounds |
Width | 1 Inches |
10. The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy
Specs:
Height | 9.4401386 Inches |
Length | 6.5200657 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | March 2018 |
Weight | 1.25 Pounds |
Width | 1.2748006 Inches |
11. The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace
Specs:
Height | 9.37 Inches |
Length | 6.38 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | February 2019 |
Weight | 1.23017942196 Pounds |
Width | 1.01 Inches |
12. Nostalgia for a Foreign Land: Studies in Russian-Language Literature in Israel (Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy)
Specs:
Height | 9.21 Inches |
Length | 6.14 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Width | 0.75 Inches |
13. Some Versions of Pastoral: Literary Criticism (New Directions Paperbook)
- Used Book in Good Condition
Features:
Specs:
Height | 8 Inches |
Length | 5.2 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | January 1974 |
Weight | 0.7 Pounds |
Width | 0.8 Inches |
🎓 Reddit experts on modern literary criticism books
The comments and opinions expressed on this page are written exclusively by redditors. To provide you with the most relevant data, we sourced opinions from the most knowledgeable Reddit users based the total number of upvotes and downvotes received across comments on subreddits where modern literary criticism books are discussed. For your reference and for the sake of transparency, here are the specialists whose opinions mattered the most in our ranking.
This thread is going to pile up with people trying to convince you that their projection of meaning is somehow profound, or people reaching for some kind of loophole/argument to preserve the Sacred Meaning of Life. I am not one of them, OP.
Welcome to the 1st world desert, friend. Comfortable life, good friends, torrid romance, hobbies, pets, music. We're hanging out at the Sizzler at the edge of the universe. Any trivial thing we want to distract ourselves from the Terror is ours to devour. All of the disposable income that life as STEMfuck Sperglords grants, all for nothing. All we can do is ride the snake. I would recommend The Trouble with Being Born by E. M. Cioran, a delightful collection of nihilistic psalms and meditations.
<3 u bb, enjoy this unwinding into the void.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Trouble-Being-Born-Cioran/dp/1611457408
Sure. Stop me when this gets boring!
The History of Middle-earth.
The History of the Hobbit.
The Road to Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and Roots and Branches, all by Tom Shippey
You should read Tolkien's Letters, too.
Other books to consider:
The LOTR reader's Companion
J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances
Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien's Middle-earth
The Keys of Middle-Earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien
Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism
J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide
If you're feeling rich, you could try to find a copy of Songs For The Philologists, a collection of poems, mostly in Old English, written by Tolkien and E.V. Gordon (I only have a .pdf copy).
I'd also read Tolkien's Beowulf criticism.
and just for fun, read Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, which is nothing to do with philology but which was cowritten by my major professor :)
Let's see, what else? Anything by Douglas A. Anderson, Verlyn Flieger or Michael Drout (especially Drout's Beowulf and the Critics and How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century.
That's pretty much all that leaps immediately to mind, just glancing over my bookshelves, but if you search for "Tolkien scholarship and criticism" you will find much, much more. Hope this helps!
Very exciting, I hope you enjoy the hell out of it for many years. I've written about this before but you might be surprised when you get out there how little you need any kind of formal system. KISS, at least to start. :) To wit:
> Ideally we'd like enough power to power 1 or 2 led nights [sic] at night, maybe a small 32in TV etc. If there is enough power, a coffee maker maybe.
All that said I may not even get to my place next week and if I do I may die in the cold there, so there is the downside to just winging it. Do you have any pictures to post of what you got?
I first discovered it in this book but I didn't have it on hand so I just googled it as best I could and found that. If it's not exactly the same it's pretty freaking close.
For a post about methodological historicism, the terms people are throwing out in response could sure use some more careful historicizing. Personally, I would call the two methods you describe "historicizing" and "strategic" or "interested" forms of reading.
Given your question, you may be interested in the work of Joseph North. His recent (and controversial) book Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History draws a broad distinction between two modes of reading: scholarship and criticism. Where that distinction gets interesting for you is when he starts characterizing the former:
>“We might call this the “historicist/contextualist” paradigm, by which I simply mean that almost all of the most influential movements in literary studies since the 1980s [i.e., since the rise of what u/drjeffy rightly calls New Historicism] have proceeded on the assumption that, for academic purposes, works of literature are chiefly of interest as diagnostic instruments for determining the state of the cultures in which they were written or read”
That looks to me a lot like what you're describing in scenario one. I'm less sure that you and he mean the same thing about scenario two, but the overlap is worth exploring if you're curious.
Penguin Classics has a short story set that I'm working my way through and it's pretty awesome. I highly recommend it. It's 80 little books for less than a dollar a piece. Penguin Little Black Classics
Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:
amazon.co.uk
amazon.ca
amazon.com.au
amazon.in
amazon.com.mx
amazon.de
amazon.it
amazon.es
amazon.com.br
amazon.nl
amazon.co.jp
amazon.fr
Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
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Anti-natalism is what you're looking for. As /u/UmamiSalami mentioned, Better Never to have Been by David Benatar is a great resource. Two of my favorite philosophers in general—who both coincidentally happened to oppose natalism—are Schopenhauer and Cioran. Check out their Studies in Pessimism and The Trouble With Being Born, respectively.
Gotta love E.M. Cioran. Best book title ever, The Trouble with Being Born.
Books:
#ACCELERATE
Inventing the Future (Left Accelerationism)
Libidinal Economy (Lyotard)
Anti-Oedipuis: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari)
Capitalist Realism (Fisher)
K-Punk(Fisher, a newly released anthology)
Articles:
This is the best introduction I've come across
The MAP (Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics)
This article from The Guardian
As this book [https://www.amazon.com/Gatekeepers-Emergence-World-Literature-1960s/dp/019027414X] points out, Kakutani had a huge negative influence on the development of World Literature. Everything had to be "magic realism" for her, on the template of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom she didn't even read until after he won the Nobel Prize. Her idea of World Literature was someone with a foreign name, educated at an American university, writing in English. She did not read any foreign languages.
So as others have said these are basically internet problems and if you log off and do some IRL political activism then those problems are much much less bad (not perfect, and I do understand that you've already had one negative experience of activism, but a lot better).
I'd also say these are largely bubble problems and if you step back and try not to take the political bubble too seriously then you will also find that helps. A lot of what you're talking about is basically the "office gossip" of the left, it's not really the substance, and just as if you spend your time at work getting involved in the gossip and not the work then you'll get depressed so too with the left.
But insofar as there's a substance issue here I do have someone you might like, but I'm giving you a health warning first. I personally feel identity politics is very important and if you negate it what you end up with is the "dirtbag left" (ie eXile, chapo etc..) which just very quickly becomes quite toxic and entitled and complacent. It's important to have compassion when thinking about people whose life experiences might be different to your own, otherwise the slide down the slope into the alt right is alarmingly short.
Now, all that said, the man you're looking for is Mark Fisher (RIP), Vampire Castle, K-Punk and Acid Communism. He was a controversial figure, but I think you're going to love him, and he's much more nuanced and compassionate (and clever) than the dirtbag crowd
I don't mean to be belligerent, because there is something to the "butt in chair" approach, but editing one's work is a huge way one learns to write better.
To use the Hemingway example, he once gave advice that one should read over everything one has written before writing for that day. (I read that in this book.) If you're working on chapter 1, read through chapter 1. If you're working on chapter 5, don't start at the beginning but read from the start of chapter 5, then read through the whole book once a week, because you want your work to feel not just contiguous but coherent. Maybe I'm saying this because I love the editing process, but I think you're really missing out on writing if you only write.
A fine example! No, I would not deface Mein Kampf, for the reasons I described above. Adolph Hitler's ideas may be as atrocious as, reportedly, his writing skill, but they still deserve to be presented, if only to serve as a grim example of the methods of persuasion employed by a genocidal dictator.
In fact, on a slightly tangential note, a man named Daniel Kalder wrote a very interesting article on Quillette on the subject of learning from the writings of dictators, as well as a book, The Infernal Library. I haven't read the book, but I highly recommend the article.
That beauty known as Little Black Classics Box Set is back in stock at Rs 2649. Also, you can get an additional 15% off with Citi Cards if your cart is 5000 or more, thus making it a steal price of Rs 2250.Perfect for gifting or that bookshelf :)
http://www.amazon.in/gp/product/0141398876/
Tim Groenland's recent book on editing Carver and Wallace might be of interest: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Editing-Raymond-Carver-Wallace/dp/1501338277
(If at all possible, don't buy it from Amazon. And if you can't afford it, please reach out; I'll get you what I can.)
https://www.amazon.ca/Little-Black-Classics-Box-Set/dp/0141398876/ref=sr_1_13?keywords=black+classics&amp;qid=1570827281&amp;sr=8-13
I don't have any favourites yet. I save them for days when I don't have time to read much.
For the sum of only £63.95, you could be the proud owner of the Kindle edition of this academic text about Russian authors who emigrated to Israel in the 90s. Or if you prefer hardcovers, it'll only set you back a measly £6k.
Richard Bentley was an 18th century scholar who produced a version of Paradise Lost that argued there were transcribing errors in the text that he went on to fix in his edition. He mostly changed some words around to what seemed more appropriate to him. There is also a great chapter in William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral about Bentley and Milton.
This penguin collection of 80 classics, which was up for ~ ₹2700 earlier, http://www.amazon.in/dp/0141398876 It's still a good deal at 3000! And not to mention beautiful.
[:)] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Trouble-Being-Born-Cioran/dp/1611457408)
Did you mean the Fisher book? If so then yes it's in print and ebook. The quotation is from its final chapter, which is the draft introduction to his never completed book, Acid Communism.
http://www.amazon.in/gp/product/0141398876/
E M Cioran's "The Trouble with Being Born" Sympathy can do wonders for the soul
Your post reminded me of this book which examines how there is more bad-ness in life than good-ness and how life is full of pain, illness, suffering and death. While there are lovely sunsets m, kisses with cute girls and various other ‘good’ things...the list is much smaller than the list of bad things.
Here is another great book. Emil (who was a fantastic modern day philosopher) examines the issues with being born, how it’s always too late for suicide and takes a sideways look at the world.
Here are a few that I've collected over the last couple of years (excluding the ones that have already been mentioned, and the ones that include a discussion of suicide methods):
SUICIDE & EUTHANASIA:
ANTINATALISM:
Somewhat less serious: