14. “Sibyl with Guitar,” Time, November 23, 1962. Cited in John Burgess, “Francis James Child,” Harvard magazine, May–June 2006, 52.
15. Stewart, “Scandals of the Ballad,” in Crimes of Writing, 102–3.
16. Ernst, in United States v. One Book called “Ulysses,” 5 F. Supp. 182 (Southern District of New York, 1933). In James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946), xi.
17. Ibid., xii.
18. Ibid., xiii–xix.
19. Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge (New York: Knopf, 1994), 338.
20. United States v. One Book called “Ulysses,” xi–xii.
21. Ibid., xii.
22. Ibid., xiv.
23. Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 40–41; Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 32–34; Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War (New York: Horizon, 1969), 174–75.
24. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, lead prosecutor, opening address to the jury, October 20, 1961. C. H. Rolph, ed., The Trial of Lady Chatterley (London: Penguin, 1961), 17.
25. Ernst, in Ulysses, viii.
26. James Douglas, “A Book That Must Be Suppressed,” Sunday Express, August 19, 1928.
27. Sally Cline, Radclyffe-Hall: A Woman Called John (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1998), 248–49.
28. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 3:193, entry August 31, 1938.
29. Woolf, Diary 3:206–7 and n., entry November 10, 1928.
30. Quoted in Leslie A. Taylor, “ ‘I Made Up My Mind to Get It’: The American Trial of The Well of Loneliness, New York City, 1928–1929,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2): 250–86.
31. See Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 476.
32. Justice Tom Clark, Dissenting Opinion in “A Book Named ‘John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’ v. Attorney General of Massachusetts,” 383. U.S. 416, March 21, 1966.
33. Rembar, The End of Obscenity, 481.
34. “Decency Squabble,” Time, March 31, 1930.
35. See, for example, Perry L. Glantzer, “In Defense of Harry … But Not His Defenders: Beyond Censorship to Justice,” The English Journal 93, no. 4 (March 2004), 58–63; Jennifer Russuck, “Banned Books: A Study of Censorship,” The English Journal 86, no. 2 (February 1997), 67–70; and Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Blas, and Dawn B. Sova, 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature (New York: Checkmark Books, 1999), 274, 365.
36. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Samuel Pepys,” in Essays: English and American, The Harvard Classics (1909–14). (New York: Collier, 1910), vol. 28.
37. Virginia Woolf, “Montaigne,” in The Common Reader: First Series, 1925 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984), 58.
38. Meyer Levin, “Life in the Secret Annex,” The New York Times Book Review, June 15, 1952.
39. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 101.
40. Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” The New Yorker, October 6, 1997, 76, reprinted in Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary (New York: Vintage, 2000), 77. See also Frank Rich, “Betrayed by Broadway,” The New York Times, September 17, 1995; Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Ralph Melnick, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Lawrence Langer, “Anne Frank Revisited,” in Using and Abusing the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Bruno Bettelheim, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,” Harper’s (November 1960), 45–50.
41. Karen Spector and Stephanie Jones, “Constructing Anne Frank: Critical Literacy and the Holocaust in Eighth-Grade English,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 51, no. 1 (September 2007), 36–48.
42. See, for example, Roger Rosenblatt, “Anne Frank,” in The Time 100, June 14, 1999. “The reason for her immortality was basically literary. She was an extraordinarily good writer, for any age.…” And “It is the cry of the Jew in the attic, but it is also the cry of the 20th century mind.”
43. Thomas Bowdler, the English physician who produced The Family Shakespeare (from 1807 to 1810), though often caricatured as a repressed Victorian who dared to alter a classic, was praised by some later readers, including the poet Swinburne, as someone who had performed a service to Shakespeare by making it possible for children to read his plays.
44. Francine Prose raises the question of whether the diary has even “been taken seriously as literature,” speculating that the failure to give Anne Frank her due as a writer may derive from the fact that the book is a diary, “or, more likely, because its author was a girl.” Prose, Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 7.
45. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1932, 1960), 248.
46. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, eds. A. W. Ward, A. R. Waller, W. P. Trent, J. Erskine, S. P. Sherman, and C. Van Doren (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–21), vol. 2, section 7, part 4, 165.
47. John Dryden, preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), in Selected Works of John Dryden, ed. William Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 398.
48. Ibid., 404–5.
49. Ibid., 405–6.
50. Washington Irving, The Life of Oliver Goldsmith (New York: John W. Lovell, 1849), 182.
51. Ibid.
52. James Boswell, Life of Johnson (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 751–52.
53. Henry James, “The Birthplace,” in Selected Short Stories (New York: Rinehart, 1955), 246.
54. “Chatterton, the marvellous Boy / The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride.” William Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence” (43–44), in William Wordsworth: Selected Poems, ed. Stephen Gill (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 139.
55. Benjamin Bailey, quoted in Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 216.
56. W. W. Skeat, The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton (London: Bell and Daldy, 1871), 1: Preface, xi.
57. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 579.
58. Blair, an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, had a big influence on education in the United States. He maintained that the chief use of literature was to enable upward mobility in society and to promote morality and virtue, and his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres were often reprinted and used by universities like Yale and Harvard, where the idea of self-improvement through eloquence and literary study found a hospitable home in the nineteenth century.
59. Stanley Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” in Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 327.
60. Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum,” in Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 167–73. Originally published in Critical Inquiry 2, no. 3 (Spring 1976), 465–85.
61. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1929).
62. Online syllabus of Professor Anthony Ubelhor, Department of English, University of Kentucky, www.uky.edu.
63. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 374.
64. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 131.
65. Ibid., 132.
66. Ibid., 131.
67. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). “Freud’s Masterplot” was originally published i
n Yale French Studies 55/56. Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (1977), 280–300.
FOUR What’s Love Got to Do with It?
1. Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography (New York: Century Company, 1907), 1:364, cited in Henry W. Simon, The Reading of Shakespeare in American Schools and Colleges (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1932), 47.
2. John Fulton, Memoirs of Frederick A. P. Barnard, Tenth President of Columbia College in the City of New York (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 36. Cited in Simon, 47.
3. Charles W. Eliot, The Man and His Beliefs (New York: Harper, 1926), 1:212–13. Cited in Simon, The Reading of Shakespeare, 48.
4. Simon, The Reading of Shakespeare in American Schools and Colleges, 47.
5. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London and New York: Penguin, 1985), 334–35.
6. Jane Austen, Persuasion (London and New York: Penguin, 1985), 192, 178.
7. U.S. Department of Education Statistics; Modern Language Association; Association of Departments of English. I am grateful to David Laurence, the director of the MLA Office of Research and ADE, for helping me to locate this information.
8. R. P. Blackmur, “A Critic’s Job of Work,” in Form and Value in Modern Poetry (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), 339.
9. Ibid., 341.
10. Ibid., 367.
11. Ibid., 339.
12. Ibid., 343.
13. Ibid., 353. My emphasis.
14. In Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3–51.
15. Burke never completed college, though he taught in several as a lecturer and visiting professor; Wilson, an influential editor and book reviewer, had a major hand in developing popular appreciation for several important American novelists, and in his own essays and books helped shape twentieth-century literary taste.
16. Edmund Wilson, The Fruits of the MLA (New York: New York Review, 1968), 20.
17. Modern Language Association of America, Professional Standards and American Editions: A Response to Edmund Wilson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1969), book epigraph.
18. Wilson, Fruits, 35.
19. Wilson, Fruits, 10.
20. Lewis Mumford, “Emerson Behind Barbed Wire,” The New York Review of Books, January 18, 1968, 3–5, 23.
21. Wilson, Fruits, 4, 6–7.
22. Ibid., 7.
23. Ibid., 8.
24. Ibid., 13.
25. Ibid., 20.
26. Ibid., 38.
27. Ibid., 8.
28. Ibid.,17.
29. Ibid., 19.
30. John H. Fisher, “The MLA Editions of Major American Authors,” in Professional Standards, 25.
31. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 44.
32. Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?,” The Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1986), 270. Originally published in The Yale Review, 1926.
33. Ibid.
34. Andrew McNeillie, introduction to The Common Reader, First Series, xi; Woolf, Diary, May 23, 1921.
35. Samuel Johnson, “Life of Gray,” in Lives of the English Poets (New York: Everyman, 1968), 2:388–89.
36. Ibid., 392.
37. Virginia Woolf, “William Hazlitt,” in The Second Common Reader, 179.
38. Ibid., 182.
39. Ibid., 183. The Hazlitt passage is from “On Old English Writers and Speakers,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930), 2: 292–93.
40. Virginia Woolf, New York Herald Tribune, September 7, 1930; Times Literary Supplement, September 18, 1930.
41. William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating,” in The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 102–13.
42. Ibid., 104.
43. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 4, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 264.
44. Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in Standard Edition, vol. 9, 143–53. Delivered as a lecture in the rooms of Hugo Heller, December 6, 107. Reported in Die Ziet the following day, full text published in a “newly established Berlin literary periodical” in 1908.
45. Ibid., 152–53.
FIVE So You Want to Read a Poem
1. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (1589), ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 311.
2. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 4, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 525.
3. Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” in The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947); in The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 1,356.
4. Ibid., 1,357.
5. Ibid., 1365.
6. Ibid., 1,362.
7. Cleanth Brooks, “The Formalist Critics,” The Kenyon Review 13, no. 1 (Winter 1951), 72.
8. Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” 1,368.
9. Ibid., 1,369.
10. Ibid., 1,370.
11. Ibid., 1,371.
12. See Steve Ellis, “The Punctuation of ‘In a Station of the Metro,’ ” in Paidenma 17:2–3 (Fall/Winter 1988) for a specific account.
13. For this and other terms within “genetic criticism,” see Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Grodin, eds., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
14. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeka, 1916 (New York: New Directions, 1974), 89.
15. “Beyond a native poetics, there is something Eastern behind the Western surface … Confucius complements Homer …” Kenneth Lincoln, Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1980–1999 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 57.
16. Rachel Blau Duplessis, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 35.
17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1884), 63.
18. C. S. Lewis, “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem,” Proceedings of the British Academy 28 (Oxford University Press). Reprinted in Alvin B. Kernan, Modern Shakespearean Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 301–11.
19. Reuben A. Brower, “Reading in Slow Motion,” in Brower and Richard Poirier, In Defense of Reading: A Reader’s Approach to Literary Criticism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), 3–21.
20. Paul de Man, “The Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 23–24.
21. Ibid., 24.
22. For an excellent analysis of this problem, see Jane Gallop, “The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading,” Profession (2007), 181–86.
23. As George Puttenham writes in what his modern editors call “the core fantasy” of his treatise The Art of English Poesy, his objective in describing poetry, metrical forms, and “poetical ornament” (that is, figures of speech) was to “have appareled him to our seeming in all his gorgeous habiliments, and pulling him first from the cart to the school, and from thence to the court, and preferring him to your Majesty’s service, in that place of great honor and magnificence to give entertainment to princes, ladies of honor, gentlewomen, and gentlemen, and by his many modes of skill to serve the many humors of men …” The “Majesty” here being addressed is Queen Elizabeth, at whose court reputations—and fortunes—were indeed made and unmade, depending upon royal favor. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, eds. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 1, 378.
2
4. John Strype, Memorials of the Most Reverend Father in God Thomas Cranmer, 2 vols. (London, 1853), 1:129. Cited in Whigham and Reborn, 1.n.
25. E. de Selincourt, The Poems of Edmund Spenser (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), xxi.
26. Edmund Spenser, “A Letter of the Authors,” in de Selincourt, Poems of Edmund Spenser, 407.
27. Jonson, “An Expostulation with Inigo Jones,” in Ben Jonson, vol. 8, ed. C. H. Percey and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 403.
28. Robert Bly, Talking All Morning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 107–8.
29. Larry Rohter, “Is Slam in Danger of Going Soft?,” The New York Times, June 3, 2009.
six Why Literature Is Always Contemporary
1. Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: Norton & Company, 2000), 1,414.
2. Virginia Woolf, “William Hazlitt,” in The Second Common Reader (1932), ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986), 180.
3. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamar, or Wits Treasury (1598), in The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents, ed. Russ MacDonald (Boston: Bedford Books, 2001), 32.
4. Susan Stewart, “Scandals of the Ballad,” in Crimes of Writing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 121.
5. Ibid., 122.
6. Jonathan Yardley, “Getting History Right,” The Washington Post, July 12, 2009.
7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets, ed. T. Ashe (London: George Bell and Sons, 1897), letter of June 15, 1827.
8. T. S. Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1932, 1950), 111.
9. It’s worth noting “cheering up” is a phrase found at least twice in Shakespeare (2 Henry IV 4.4.13; Macbeth 4.1.127) and is not in itself a modern idiom.
10. T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in Selected Essays, 121.
11. E. Talbot Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York: Ronald Press, 1958, second edition, 1975), 1,044–45.
12. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, eds., Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2007). Evelyn Gajowski, ed., Presentism: Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
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