The Use and Abuse of Literature
Page 36
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 111.
37. John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817, in Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 54.
38. De Man’s comments on metaphor were written some years prior to the emergence of the cognitive theories popularized by Lakoff and his collaborators, but they nonetheless provide a thoughtful counterpoint, since De Man is concerned chiefly with stressing “the futility of trying to repress the rhetorical structure of texts in the name of uncritically preconceived text models such as transcendental teleologies or, at the other end of the spectrum, mere codes.” Contrary to the primacy claimed by cognitive theorists for stories and parables as the building blocks of mind, De Man offers the possibility that “temporal articulations, such as narratives or histories, are a correlative of rhetoric and not the reverse.” Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” 16, 19, 27, 28.
39. Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 11.
40. Thus, King Lear’s despairing “In such a night / To shut me out” harks back, in her view, to the lyrical conversation between Jessica and Lorenzo in act 5 of The Merchant of Venice, and both are indebted to the classical “O qualis nox?” Colie, 11–12.
41. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 94.
42. Ibid., 70.
NINE The Impossibility of Closure
1. Oxford English Dictionary draft additions, March 2007.
2. The Indexer: The Journal of the Society of Indexers 15:72/2 (1986). OED, obelisk, 2.b.
3. Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning and the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 295–320.
4. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 3–4.
5. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 101–2.
6. For example, Susan Winnett, “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 105, no. 3 (May 1990), 505–18, and Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” in Alice Doesn’t (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 103–57.
7. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 174–75.
8. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater (London: W. Scott, 1886), 92–93.
9. Joel J. Brattin, “Dickens and Serial Publication,” PBS, 2003, www.pbs.org.
10. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 7.
11. Ibid., 23–24.
12. Edward. W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975, 1985), 6.
13. Ibid., xii.
14. Ibid., 380.
15. Ibid., xiii.
16. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292–93.
17. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 403–4.
18. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 241.
19. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 593.
20. Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” vol. 23, Standard Edition, 219.
21. Ibid., 219–20.
22. Ibid., 236.
23. Ibid.
24. George Orwell, Animal Farm (1946) (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2003), 18.
25. Ibid., 48.
26. Ibid., 63.
27. Ibid., 75.
28. Ibid., 92.
29. E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (1952) (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 80–81.
30. Orwell, Animal Farm, 97.
31. White, Charlotte’s Web, 183.
32. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in Labyrinths: Selected Short Stories and Other Writings, trans. James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 51, 58.
33. André Maurois, preface to Borges, Labyrinths, xviii.
34. Borges, Labyrinths, 249.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, and chair of the Program in Dramatic Arts. She has served as director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, chair of the department of Visual and Environmental Studies, and director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. A member of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies and a trustee of the English Institute, she is the former president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and a continuing member of its board. She has published fifteen books and edited seven collections of essays on topics from Shakespeare to literary and cultural theory to the arts and intellectual life. Shakespeare After All received the 2005 Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Newsweek magazine chose Shakespeare After All as one of the five best nonfiction books of 2004, and praised it as the “indispensable introduction to an indispensable writer … Garber’s is the most exhilarating seminar room you’ll ever enter.”
Her previous book from Pantheon is Shakespeare and Modern Culture. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Use and Abuse
2. The Pleasures of the Canon
3. What Isn’t Literature
4. What’s Love Got to Do with It?
5. So You Want to Read a Poem
6. Why Literature Is Always Contemporary
7. On Truth and Lie in a Literary Sense
8. Mixed Metaphors
9. The Impossibility of Closure
Notes
About the Author