Prospects of power : tragedy, satire, the essay, and the theory of genre / John Snyder.

By:

Snyder, John

Material type: Text

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

9780813156880
0813156882

Subject(s): Genre/Form:

Electronic books.

Additional physical formats: Print version:: Prospects Of Power : Tragedy, Satire, the Essay, and the Theory of Genre.DDC classification:

801.95 23

LOC classification:

PN45.5

Online resources:

Click here to access online

Contents:

1. Contemporary Genre Theory -- 2. Tragedies: Persians: Tragedy of Battle Victory; Eumenides: Tragedy of State Victory; Philoctetes: Tragedy of Stalemate; Medea: Tragedy of Winner-Lose-All -- 3. Tragic Genre -- 4. Satires; Juvenal: Satire to Tragedy; Petronius: Satire to Novel; Don Quixote: Satire to Fantasy to Romance to Novel; Butler: Conservative Satire to Mock Epic; Twain: Liberal Burlesque to Novel; Hasek: Menippean Satire to Anarchism -- 5. Satiric Semigenre -- 6. On and of the Essay as Nongenre; Retreat: Cicero and Montaigne; Lover of Fortuna and Enemy: Machiavelli and Bacon; "Retraite absolue": Rousseau; Aggression and Experimentalism: Emerson and Nietzsche -- 7. Toward a Dialectical Theory of Genre.

Summary: Genre -- the articulation of 'kind' - is one of the oldest and most continuous subjects of theoretical and critical commentary. Yet from Romanticism to postmodernism, the concept of genre has been punched with so many holes that today it hardly seems graspable, let alone viable. By combining theory with dialectical literary histories of three significantly different genres - tragedy, satire, and the essay - John Snyder reconstructs genre as the figural deployment of symbolic power. One purpose of this approach is to reconcile the recent dismantling of representational and classificatory genres with the incipient notion in post-Althusser Marxism that genre is the crucial mediation between history and aesthetics. Snyder extends certain implications of Aristotle, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Serres. He also offers the first antisystem yet comprehensive genre theory to serve as a fully distinct alternate to Frye's formalist and Genette's structuralist schemes. Finally, Snyder's theory of genre as power opens a way to a fundamentally new theory of literature itself: that aesthetic language deployed as power organizes itself as generic intervention. Three historically dynamic configurations establish the range of all possible genres - tragedy as power politically deployed as mimesis, satire as power rationally deployed as rhetoric, and the essay as power textually deployed as constative rhetoric. Specific analyses developing this important new theory cover a broad spectrum of literature, from classical to contemporary. Other genres, different media, and a variety of subgenres and modes political and religious - all acquire fresh significance from the elaborations of Snyder's three selected genres.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Materials specified	Status	Date due	Barcode
Electronic-Books	OPJGU Sonepat- Campus	E-Books EBSCO			Available

Print version record.

Genre -- the articulation of 'kind' - is one of the oldest and most continuous subjects of theoretical and critical commentary. Yet from Romanticism to postmodernism, the concept of genre has been punched with so many holes that today it hardly seems graspable, let alone viable. By combining theory with dialectical literary histories of three significantly different genres - tragedy, satire, and the essay - John Snyder reconstructs genre as the figural deployment of symbolic power. One purpose of this approach is to reconcile the recent dismantling of representational and classificatory genres with the incipient notion in post-Althusser Marxism that genre is the crucial mediation between history and aesthetics. Snyder extends certain implications of Aristotle, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Serres. He also offers the first antisystem yet comprehensive genre theory to serve as a fully distinct alternate to Frye's formalist and Genette's structuralist schemes. Finally, Snyder's theory of genre as power opens a way to a fundamentally new theory of literature itself: that aesthetic language deployed as power organizes itself as generic intervention. Three historically dynamic configurations establish the range of all possible genres - tragedy as power politically deployed as mimesis, satire as power rationally deployed as rhetoric, and the essay as power textually deployed as constative rhetoric. Specific analyses developing this important new theory cover a broad spectrum of literature, from classical to contemporary. Other genres, different media, and a variety of subgenres and modes political and religious - all acquire fresh significance from the elaborations of Snyder's three selected genres.

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