Barbara Herrnstein Smith | |
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Born | 1932 (age 91–92) Bronx, New York |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | City College of New York, Harvard, Brandeis University |
Period | 1968– |
Notable awards |
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Barbara Herrnstein Smith (born 1932) is an American literary critic and theorist, best known for her work Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. She is currently the Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University, and also Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University.
Smith briefly studied at City College of New York, [1] studying biology, experimental psychology, and philosophy. She then earned her B.A. (summa cum laude)[ citation needed ] in 1954 and her Ph.D. from Brandeis University. Brandeis University reports Smith earned her doctorate in 1965, [2] and Duke University reports she earned her doctorate in 1963. [3]
From 1961 to 1973, Smith taught at Bennington College. She accepted a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. In 1987 she joined the Duke University faculty, and also joined Brown University in 2003.
Smith has also occupied numerous short-term and honorary posts. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Smith is a well-known writer, most particularly for her 1988 work on critical theory, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. In this work, she attempts to situate the various liberal, conservative, and other views of "values" within her "metametatheory" of contingencies, an economics-influenced theoretical approach. She uses her theory to address literary, aesthetic, and other types of values, attempting to discern whether any objective standards may be applied.
Other works include Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy, and an edition of Shakespeare's sonnets; she has published numerous books and articles on language, literature, and critical theory.
In recent years she has been doing considerable work on science and the humanities, including Scandalous Knowledge and her 2006 Terry lectures at Yale, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion.
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A caudate sonnet is an expanded version of the sonnet. It consists of 14 lines in standard sonnet forms followed by a coda.
Poetic closure is the sense of conclusion given at the end of a poem. Barbara Herrnstein Smith's detailed study—Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End—explores various techniques for achieving closure. One of the most common techniques is setting up a regular pattern and then breaking it to mark the end of a poem. Another technique is to refer to subject matter that in itself provides a sense of closure: death is the clearest example of this.
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Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory is a 1988 book by literary critic and professor Barbara Herrnstein Smith. In the book, she presents a relativistic theory of value, contending that value emerges from a dynamic process of changing and interacting variables.
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