Many of the texts discussed in Charles Bressler's Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice can be found online, usually in digital collections at various libraries. The section below called "Text Links" provides links to those texts in alphabetical order of author's name. For texts not available online, we'll work from copies. You'll be responsible for familiarizing yourself with the relevant novels: Charles Dickens, David Copperfield; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Bressler also includes a list of websites, called "Web Sites for Exploration," at the end of many chapters. I've included these sites according to chapter under the section below called "Web Sites for Exploration." Many of the URLs given in Bressler's text are incorrect; I've corrected URLs (where possible) and deleted inoperable links.
Sites Bressler doesn't mention but that I find helpful, I've added under the relevant section and called "My Recommendations."
Atwood, Margaret
"Spelling" (handout?)
Glaspell, Susan
Trifles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
"The Maypole of Merry Mount"
publication information of digital copy
full text
"Young Goodman Brown"
Hemingway, Ernest
"A Very Short Story"
Keats, John
"To Autumn"
"Ode on a Grecian Urn"
O'Connor, Flannery
"A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Poe, Edgar Allan
"The City in the Sea"
Chapter 2, New Criticism
IPL Online Literary Criticism Collection
working definition of New Criticism
excerpt from English in America: A Radical View of the Profession by Richard Ohmann
prefatory "Letter to the Teacher" and selection from Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's Understanding Poetry
outline of Brooks' essay "Irony as a Principle of Structure"
detailed bibliography for Wellek and links to other New Critical sites
My Recommendations
Modern Poetry
Chapter 4, Reader-Response Criticism
overview of rr positions
text of Miall and Kuiken's essay "Forms of Reading: Recovering the Self-as-Reader"
Chapter 5, Structuralism
background on formalism and structuralism
explains concepts from Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics
elements of structuralism
more on de Saussure
classes of signs
Chapter 6, Deconstruction
basic assumptions
Derrida bibliography
highlights differences between structuralism and poststructuralism
*My Recommendations*
Deconstruction
Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
More About Derridean Deconstruction
Implications of Deconstruction in the English Classroom
Chapter 7, Psychoanalytic Criticism
key terms and concepts
overview of psychoanalysis & Freud
overview of Jacques Lacan
Chapter 8, Feminism
My Recommendations
***Women-Related Arts and Humanities Sites - Literature, part of Joan Korenman's highly-acclaimed Women's Studies/Women's Issues Resource Sites. In the Literature section, you'll find links to websites ranging from the Schomburg's digitized collection of African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, to British Women Romantic Poets, to Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy, to Women and the Holocaust.
***Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color
Chapter 9, Marxism
first published: 18 january 2002
last revised: 8 march 2002
webspinner: s.d.shattuck