Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present

Children Exploitation in John Burnside’s The Dumb House

“…The main factor of his unstable character is the different neurotic attitudes which he adopts. In his book A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present, Rafey Habib (2005) proposes that neurosis is the prime cause of anxiety. As neurosis develops, the character begins to suffer psychological instability and disorder so that "neuroses might have a psychological rather than physiological origin" (p.574).…”

Literary Criticism, Cognitive Culture, and the World Intangible Cultural Heritage

“…The universalist perspective could (and should) not be simply dismissed, given its strong spiritual appeal and the growing body of social and cultural evidence that seem to support the panrationalist intimations of the historical Enlightenment (ironically enough, at a time when they simultaneously come under the most savage attack from different breeds of radical philosophical relativists). It is, for instance, relevant that, taking upon himself the daring task of distilling an overview of the literary criticism from ancient to modern times, a widely-learned and theoretically sophisticated Muslim British Indian scholar such as M. A. R. Habib has no problem in strictly identifying it with a historical canon unequivocally rooted in Greek-Latin and Judeo-Christian hermeneutical and philosophical traditions (Habib 2005). Still, the fact that such visions presuppose on so many levels the notion of a common and essential humanity does not from itself make them exhaustive.…”

The Teaching of Children's Literature: A Case Study of Primary Teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge

“…The development of reader-orientated theory was in response to dissatisfaction with more objective theories from the earlier twentieth century (Habib, 2011) which regarded texts as being independent of readers (Guerin, 2005). Reader-orientated theories (see the third column of Table 3.1) involve a variety of critical stances, but with the belief that readers are responsible for the creation of meaning (Newton, 1997).…”

“…Earlier objective theories viewed the inclusion of the readers in interpretation as allowing subjectivity and relativism into the making of meaning (Guerin, 2005), while reader-orientated approaches demand acknowledgement of the reader or audience in any literary analysis (Habib, 2011). In contrast to earlier text-orientated theories, the reader-orientated approach turned away from assuming texts were self-contained aesthetic objects and instead pondered the making of meaning when the reader and the text came together (Dobie, 2012;Habib, 2011).…”

“…In contrast to earlier text-orientated theories, the reader-orientated approach turned away from assuming texts were self-contained aesthetic objects and instead pondered the making of meaning when the reader and the text came together (Dobie, 2012;Habib, 2011). The main tenet within readerorientated approaches is that the reader is the most important element in the interpretation process (Guerin, 2005).…”