Criticism
Jane Roberta Cooper, ed., Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Revisions, 1951–81
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984).
An excellent collection of reviews and critical articles concerned with Rich’s
poetry and prose published through the late 1970s.
Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, eds., Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and
Prose (New York: Norton, 1993).
Critical anthology, useful for both research and teaching, offering a selection of
Rich’s poetry and prose as well as many reviews and critical articles.
Jane Hoogestraat, “‘Unnameable by Choice’: Multivalent Silences in Adrienne
Rich’s Time’s Power,” in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing As
Transgression, edited by Deidre Lashgari (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1995), pp. 25–37.
Excellent feminist analysis of Rich’s uses of silences and the breaking of silences
in Time’s Power (1989). The critical approach is applicable to Rich’s other works.
Claire Keyes, The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich (Athens: Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 1986).
An incisive feminist examination of Rich’s oeuvre through the mid 1980s.
Cheri Colby Langdell, Adrienne Rich: The Moment of Change (Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 2004).
The most comprehensive critical analysis on Rich’s work to date. Langdell pre-
sents a feminist understanding of the poetic and political changes informing
Rich’s work published through the early twenty-first century.
Susan Sheridan, “Adrienne Rich and the Women’s Liberation Movement: A
Politics of Reception,” Women’s Studies, 35, 1 (2006): 17–45.
Examines reviews appearing between the publication of Diving into the Wreck in
1973 and Dream of a Common Language in 1978 in order to trace the impact of
Rich’s feminism on the critical reception of her work.
— Billy Clem and Linda Trinh Moserh
Philip Roth, The Human Stain
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000)Philip Roth, first known for Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy’s Complaint
(1969), is one of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. He has won nearly every major award for American authors (including
the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award twice, the National Book Crit-
ics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, and the highest
honor of the American Academy of Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction), as well