Critical Terms for Literary Study by Frank Lentricchia
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Terrible. In my opinion it had no educational value at all.
The editor claims in his introduction that the purpose of this collection of essays is to offer the reader an application oriented approach to learning the value and use of literary critical terms. Unfortunately, most essays in this collection wander so far off the actual topic of discussion that neither application nor even a simple definition of the term is ever given. In one instance, the author of an essay succeeded in giving away the ending to five works of fiction that I had not yet read. After that I was reluctant to suffer through any more “essays”, yet they were part of my reading list.
I am just glad that I did not have to pay for this book as the cost was already included in tuition, otherwise it would have been the second book in my long list of read textbooks to ever fly straight across the room.
