Specialized Materials

On the occasion of the recent publication of the hefty Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, I will review in the coming pages two of the Norton's main competitors (Richter's The Critical Tradition and Rivkin and Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology) before turning my attention to Norton's entry into the critical theory textbook field, discussing briefly the strengths and weaknesses of all three. But given the fact that these anthologies serve only as core texts in a critical theory class, and in my opinion need substantial supplementation, I will also suggest some possibilities for your consideration, among them some of the newest entries in Routledge's "New Critical Idiom" series, which I reviewed in this column two years ago.

The second edition of David H. Richter's The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends (Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998) is a popular and widely used core anthology in critical-theory classes across the nation. It is certainly easy to see why this is the case. Divided into two parts (following the organization suggested by its subtitle) this textbook is especially good for classes that must by design or professorial inclination cover the entire history of criticism and theory from Plato to the present. Its "Classic Texts" section contains fifty-eight entries by forty-four critics, including (as one might expect) Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and T. S. Eliot. Its "Contemporary Trends" section contains sixty-two selections by approximately the same number of critics. This section is subdivided into the following genres of contemporary theory: "Formalisms," "Structuralism, Semiotics, and Deconstruction," "Reader-Response Criticism," "Psychoanalytic Theory," "Marxist Criticism," "New Historicism and Cultural Studies," "Feminist Literary Criticism," "Gender Studies and Queer Theory," and "Multiculturalism and the Canon Wars." Each section is introduced capably with an overview of the methodology or genre of analysis being covered and all selections are well footnoted.

Yet given the span of the textbook, anthologizing as it does the work of two and a half millennia in its approximately 1600 pages, some of its coverage is inevitably thin, especially in its latter sections. Postcolonial theory is not separated out as a distinct critical field; instead it receives sketchy attention in "New Historicism and Cultural Studies" and "Multiculturalism." Gayatri Spivak, one of the most important and influential feminist postcolonial critics, is nowhere to be found. Furthermore, since there is room only for six selections covering the broad and complex field of "Feminism," it is hardly surprising but certainly distressing that there are no articulations from lesbian feminists that would demonstrate their important relationship to the larger field (works by Audre Lorde, Bonnie Zimmerman, and/or Adrienne Rich would have been obvious choices). And finally post-structuralism does not get sufficient attention as fundamental to most other contemporary theoretical perspectives and as a field demanding clear distinction from structuralism and semiotics. Indeed, the fact that post-structuralism is reduced simply to "deconstruction" is highly problematic.

Some of these problems are resolved in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1998), though others are immediately apparent that Richter's text did not evince. Rivkin and Ryan's strengths are several. As a text that focuses solely on the twentieth century, its coverage of contemporary theoretical perspectives is much deeper than Richter's. In its approximately 1100 pages, we find almost double the number of entries under roughly the same number of sub-headings that we find in Richter's last section. Thus Rivkin and Ryan's coverage of "Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Post-Modernism" is much more representative of the wealth and diversity of material in that broad field, including several selections by Derrida and Foucault, and others by Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari; the section even includes selections by Nietzsche and Heidegger that demonstrate the philosophical history behind post-structuralist interrogations of naturalized meanings and binary constructs. Similarly, Rivkin and Ryan's "Feminism" section offers twelve selections that sample amply both Anglo-American...