The Critical Experience: Literacy Reading, Writing, and Criticism

This is a super introduction to various critical approaches. Unlike authors of other books of this kind, the authors of "The Critical Experience" write in easy-to-understand language rather than stilted Academian. It was probably not designed for MA students, or even for undergraduates who sit in the library, bantering about the benefits of new historicism and why relativism is impractical.Now, as an MA student, I have found myself returning to this book on numerous occasions throughout my academic career, and sometimes it's refreshing to go to a textbook for clarification and finding it without being made to feel like a dolt because I have to look up every other word in my elegant, pretentious textbook.Admittedly, there are moments in this book when the authors become excessively chatty (esp. in the Poststructuralist chapter) and it is maddening, but there is a lot of good information to be taken from these pages. It isn't the ultimate Critical Experience, and it doesn't set out to be. But it's not "Dick and Jane's Pop-up Book of Literary Criticism," either.