What is a book? / David Kirby.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kirby, David, 1944-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Books and reading--United States.

Books and reading.

Book reviewing.

United States.

Book reviewing--United States.

Criticism--United States.

Criticism.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xvii, 221 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, [2002]

Summary:

In What Is a Book? David Kirby addresses the making and consuming of literature by redefining the four components of the act of reading: writer, reader, critic, and book. He discusses his students, his work, and his practice as a teacher, writer, critic, and reader, and positions his theories and opinions as products of "real" life as much as academic exercise. Among the ideas animating the book are Kirby's beliefs that "devotion is more important than dissection" and "practice is more important than theory." Covering an impressive range of writers-from Emerson, Poe, and Melville to James Dickey, Charles Wright, Richard Howard, Susan Montez, and others-Kirby considers the evolution of critical theory from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth and explores the role of criticism in contemporary culture. Drawing from his experience writing poetry and reading to children at a local housing project, he answers two of his four central questions: "What is a reader?" and "What is a writer?" In the largest section of the book, "What Is a Critic?," Kirby demonstrates his passionate engagement with the function of the critic in literary culture and offers both overviews and close examinations of literary theory, book reviewing, and the historical background of criticism from its earliest beginnings. In the final section of the book, he addresses the question "What is a book?" with an examination of the reading preferences of older readers. Kirby's analysis of those responses, along with his own notions of the literary canon, is an insightful excursion into how books are valued. Deeply learned and wonderfully entertaining, What Is a Book? is a lucid look at the whole of literary culture. Kirby makes us think about the books we love and why we love them.

Contents:

What is a Reader?

What is a Writer?

Breakfast with the Cumaean Sibyl, or A Poet's Education 31

Don't Know Much about History: Sameness versus Originality in Poetry 48

Is There a Southern Poetry? 72

The Poet as Pitchman: James Dickey, American Poet 87

What is a Critic?

Emerson, Poe, and American Criticism in the Nineteenth Century 93

Slouching toward Baltimore: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism 102

What Is a Critic? 117

Mr. Post-Everything: The Life and Times of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch 128

"The Thing You Can't Explain": Theory and the Unconscious 138

Reviewers in the Popular Press and Their Impact on the Novel 150

M. L. Rosenthal and Our Life in Poetry 159

What is a Book?

Ghosts and Gadabouts: Gothic and Picaresque in the American Novel 165

Born in the Marketplace: The Emergence of the American Novel 174

It Isn't about America, It Is America: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn 183.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-207) and index.

ISBN:

0820324418

0820324787

OCLC:

48967798