Plots is an almost perfect book by one of this country's great scholar-teachers on why the literary art of arranging episodes matters to us. Not only luminously smart but also perfectly plotted (Robert L. Belknap's model plot-mongers are Shakespeare and Dostoevsky), each detail of the book's structure, chronological argument, and diction conspire to create that rare work of criticism: a ... Read morestory we cannot put down.
Caryl Emerson, Princeton University Plots is a brilliant piece of work, well-written, and insightful-a sheer pleasure to follow. Belknap's definitions of the terms of Russian formalism are clearer than anyone else's, and his sense of what they suggest is richer.
Gary Morson, Northwestern University Plots has an adamantine quality, as if decades of thought and teaching were being crystallized and enormously compressed... Plots reveals that with Belknap's death, we lost a critic and literary historian of great power and considerable ingenuity.
Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed You may never look at a story the same way again after reading Robert Belknap's incisively clear and illuminating book, titled simply, Plots. The Fictional 100 A valuable addition to the scholarship on plot and narration Choice Show Less