Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory

Literary and cultural theory is one of the most important components of the contemporary Humanities. While not quite a discipline in its own right, it stands apart from actual literary or cultural critical practice as a body of ideas with such significant substance and influence that they merit study on their own. Terms such as "difference," "hybridity," and "performativity" are both important theoretical concepts and crucial tools of analysis in the critical study of literature and culture. Students need accessible descriptions of them of the kind that a multi-volume encyclopedia can provide. Moreover, the names of theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Zizek have become such a taken-for-granted part of the landscape of literary and cultural discussion that a great service would be done to students by providing them with handy, brief summaries of their work and of their ideas. Literary and cultural theory has reached a point of maturity in its development where an assembling and arranging of knowledge in the field of the kind associated usually with an encyclopedia seems warranted.§§The encyclopedia would consist of three volumes:§§Volume One, edited by Prof. Gregory Castle of Arizona State University, would address the period from 1900 to 1966. This volume would cover Russian Formalism, Anglo-American New Criticism, Italian neo-idealist aesthetics, the New Humanism, Stylistics, Archetypal Criticism, Rhetorical Criticism, and Structuralism. It would include entries on such terms as "defamiliarization" and "heteroglossia" and on theorists such as Shklovsky, Bakhtin, Richards, Eliot, Brooks, Burke, and Barthes.§§Volume Two, edited by Prof. Jean-Michel Rabaté of the University of Pennsylvania, would address the period from 1966 to the present. It would cover Post-Structuralism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Narratology, Gender Theory, among other schools of thought. This volume would address terms such as "difference" and "performativity" and such theorists as Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Greenblatt, Butler, and Zizek.§§Volume Three, edited by Prof M. Keith Booker of the University of Arkansas, would be devoted to cultural theory. This volume would contain entries on such theoretical concepts and undertakings as "hybridity" and "critical race theory" and such theorists as Fanon, Geertz, Haraway, Benjamin, Adorno, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, and Agamben.§§Each volume would consist of 80 to 100 entries ranging in length from 500 to 5000 words. Shorter entries would be used for figures such as Tinjanov or Ransom whose work, while important, did not transform the field or introduce entirely new ideas. Longer entries would be devoted to important figures such as Bakhtin and Butler and to transformative ideas or undertakings such as "difference" and "the New Criticism."