Background
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein was born on August 6, 1932 in New York City.
( In Poetic Closure, distinguished literary scholar Barba...)
In Poetic Closure, distinguished literary scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith explores the provocative question: How do poems end? To answer it, Smith examines numerous individual poems and examples of common poetic forms in order to reveal the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem. First published in 1968, Smith’s book remains essential reading in poetic theory. “Ranging from Elizabethan lyric through free and syllabic verse and concrete poetry, Poetic Closure is a learned, witty, and richly illustrated study of the behavior of poems. . . . It can be read, enjoyed, studied by people who like reading poetry, including—I would suspect—poets.”—Richard M. Elman, New York Times Book Review
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226763439/?tag=2022091-20
(In this centrally focused collection of articles and lect...)
In this centrally focused collection of articles and lectures, Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines a fundamental problem of literary theory: the location of its own subject, "literature." Through an analysis of the dynamics of verbal behavior, she argues that while terms such as "literature," "fiction," and "poetry" resist clear-cut and stable definition we nevertheless learn to make functional distinctions among various verbal acts and events. Smith asserts that an appreciation of the nature and significance of those distinctions is crucial to our understanding of literature and to the methods and goals of literary study.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226764524/?tag=2022091-20
( Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without ...)
Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the perennial--perhaps eternal--clash of belief and skepticism, on our need for intellectual stability and our experience of its inevitable disruption. Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these controversies often lead and on the charges--"absurdity," "irrationalism," "complicity," "blindness," "stubbornness"--that typically accompany them, Smith stresses our tendency to give self-flattering reasons for our own beliefs and to discount or demonize the motives of those who disagree with us. Her account of the resulting cognitive and rhetorical dynamics of intellectual conflict draws on recent research and theory in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the history and sociology of science, as well as on contemporary philosophy and language theory. Smith's analyses take her into important ongoing debates over the possibility of an objective grounding of legal and political judgments, the continuing value of Enlightenment rationalism, significant challenges to dominant ideas of scientific truth, and proper responses to denials of the factuality of the Holocaust. As she explores these and other controversies, Smith develops fresh ways to understand their motives and energies, and more positive ways to see the operations of intellectual conflict more generally.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674064925/?tag=2022091-20
(studies include Faulkner, Lolita, Emma, e. e. cummings, M...)
studies include Faulkner, Lolita, Emma, e. e. cummings, Mad Magazine, trends in German literary semiotics
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005UJT4X0/?tag=2022091-20
( Charges of abandoned standards issue from government of...)
Charges of abandoned standards issue from government offices; laments for the loss of the best that has been thought and said resound through university corridors. While revisionists are perplexed by questions of value, critical theory--haunted by the heresy of relativism--remains captive to classical formulas. Barbara Herrnstein Smith's book confronts the conceptual problems and sociopolitical conflicts at the heart of these issues and raises their discussion to a new level of sophistication. Polemical without being rancorous, Contingencies of Value mounts a powerful critique of traditional conceptions of value, taste, judgment, and justification. Through incisive discussions of works by, among others, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Northrop Frye, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Jürgen Habermas, Smith develops an illuminating alternative framework for the explanation of these topics. All value, she argues, is radically contingent. Neither an objective property of things nor merely a subjective response to them, it is the variable effect of numerous interacting economies that is, systems of apportionment and circulation of "goods." Aesthetic value, moral value, and the truth-value of judgments are no exceptions, though traditional critical theory, ethics, and philosophy of language have always tried to prove otherwise. Smith deals in an original way with a wide variety of contemporary issues--from the relation between popular and high culture to the conflicting conception of human motives and actions in economic theory and classical humanism. In an important final chapter, she addresses directly the crucial problem of relativism and explains why a denial of the objectivity of value does not--as commonly feared and charged--produce either a fatuous egalitarianism or moral and political paralysis.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674167864/?tag=2022091-20
(In Poetic Closure, distinguished literary scholar Barbara...)
In Poetic Closure, distinguished literary scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith explores the provocative question: How do poems end? To answer it, Smith examines numerous individual poems and examples of common poetic forms in order to reveal the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem. First published in 1968, Smith's book remains essential reading in poetic theory.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1459627601/?tag=2022091-20
writer English language and literature educator
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein was born on August 6, 1932 in New York City.
Bachelor summa cum laude, Brandeis University, 1954. Master of Arts, Brandeis University, 1955. Doctor of Philosophy in English and American Literature, Brandeis University, 1965.
Member of faculty division literature and languages, Bennington College, 1961-1973;
chairman division literature and languages, Bennington College, 1967-1968, 71-72;
visiting lecturer committee, University of Pennsylvania, 1973-1974;
Professor of English and committee, University of Pennsylvania, 1974-1980;
University professor, University of Pennsylvania, 1980-1987;
Braxton Craven professor comparative literature and English, Duke U., Durham, North Carolina, since 1987. Coordinator committee establish graduate program comparative literature University of Pennsylvania, 1976-1979,member administrative committee graduate program comparative literature and literature theory,1979-1987, member academic advisory county to dean, 1979-1981, member SAS provost's county, 1979-1981, director center cultural studies, 1979-1985, chairman graduate program comparative literature and literature theory, 1981-1984. Member of faculty school criticism and theory University of California, Irvine, summer 1977.
Visiting scholar Princeton University, 1980. Member board overseers' visiting committee Harvard University, 1981-1987. Member Delegation professors Comparative Literature to People's Republic of China, 1983.
Member external review committees Franklin and Marshall College, University of Minnesota, Glassboro State College, Georgia Institute Technology, 1985-1986. Director summer seminar college teachers National Endowment for Humanities, 1985. Member various committees Duke U., since 1987, member programsci., technical and human values, 1987, board advisors Duke U. Press, 1987-1990, acting director graduate studies graduate program literature, 1989, director center interdisciplinary studies science and cultural theory, since 1991.
Member facultysch. criticism and theory Dartmouth College, summer 1989. Northrop Frye chair literature theory U. Toronto, 1990. Member Delegation professors LIt. andLinguistics to Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, 1990.
Consultant in field; guest lecturer in field.
( Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without ...)
( In Poetic Closure, distinguished literary scholar Barba...)
(In Poetic Closure, distinguished literary scholar Barbara...)
(In this centrally focused collection of articles and lect...)
( Charges of abandoned standards issue from government of...)
(studies include Faulkner, Lolita, Emma, e. e. cummings, M...)
(Literary Criticism)
(hardcover)
Member American Association for the Advancement of Science, Modern Language Association (member executive committee poetry division 1976-1978, member executive committee division philosophical approaches literature 1980-1984, member committee research activities 1983-1984, president 1988), American Comparative Literature Association, International Association Philosophy & Literature, Academy Literature Studies, Society Critical Exchange (president 1987-1989), English Institute (member supervising committee 1978-1980, trustee 1986-1993), Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Richard J. Herrnstein, May 1951 (divorced 1961). Married Thomas H. Smith, February 1964 (divorced 1974). Children: Julia, Deirdre.