John Sutherland's new book '50 Literature Ideas you Really Need to Know'.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/30/john-sutherland-top-10-books-about-books

An article in The Guardian about John Sutherland's new book called 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know. I've enjoyed his other books. This piece lists his top 10 literary critics.

"There are only a handful of grand-master literary critics in action at any one time in the English-speaking world. We lost one of our greatest literary critics, Frank Kermode, a few months ago. That leaves, by my count, Christopher Ricks, Terry Eagleton, and Elaine Showalter. Others will have a different pantheon – but if they're honest it will be highly select.

"The hardest lit-crit is that which asks the simplest questions. What's the difference between a 'story' by Ian McEwan and a 'story' on the front page of the Guardian? What precisely, is 'lost' in translation? Literature 'means' something. But is that meaning located in the author's mind, on the page, or in the reader's mind? Why does literature (unlike, say, the discourses of law or science) cultivate 'ambiguity' – saying many things at the same time?"

The top 10

1. Aristotle, The Poetics (Ingram Bywater translation)
2. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966)
3. Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? (1980)
4. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1978)
5. Roland Barthes, S/Z (1977: Richard Miller translation)
6. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (revised edition, 2000)
7. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)
8. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980)
9. Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (1963)
10. Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey (1988)


I studied Critical Theory at uni last semester, and I'm interested in this stuff. I bought some books by Frank Kermode for myself for Christmas. The comments suggest other books, and question the exclusion of Harold Bloom. I can no longer think of Harold Bloom without thinking of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obTNwPJvOI8