1. National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Study of Literary Reading in America (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, June 2004), www.arts.gov; “Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline, According to National Endowment of the Arts Survey,” National Endowment for the Arts, July 8, 2004, www.arts.gov.
2. Reading at Risk, ix–xii.
3. Ibid., 18.
4. Ibid., 2.
5. Ibid., vii.
6. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives of the Poets (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1880), 38.
7. Maria Edgeworth, Moral Tales for Young People (London: Routledge, 1863), 179.
8. Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (New York: C. S. Francis & Co., 1845), 16–17.
9. Oliver Goldsmith, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (London: Dodsley, 1759).
10. Thomas A. Trollope, What I Remember (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889), 3:131.
11. Harris Interactive Poll #37, conducted online within the United States between March 11 and March 18, 2008. 2,513 adults, aged eighteen and over, responded. Results released April 7, 2008.
12. “A letter, a litter. Une lettre, une ordure. On a équivocé dans le cénacle de Joyce sur l’homophonie de ces mots en anglais.” Jaques Lacan, “Le Seminaire sur ‘La lettre volée,’ ” Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 25. The actual reference in Joyce is slightly different from Lacan’s recollection: “The letter! The litter!” (Finnegans Wake 93, 123) and “type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward” (FW 615).
13. Emily Dickinson, letter to Colonel T. W. Higgonson, August 1870, in Martha Bianchi, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1924), 276.
14. A. E. Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry” (1933), in The Name and Nature of Poetry and Other Selected Prose (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1961), 193.
15. John Keats, letter to J. H. Reynolds, February 3, 1818, in Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 86–87.
16. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” published in Longman’s Magazine 4 (September 1884) and reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888).
17. Matthew Arnold and Thomas Arnold, Their Influence on English Education (New York: Scribner, 1898), 104.
18. Adam Phillips, preface to Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvii.
19. Ibid., 366.
20. Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, ed. Dorothy M. Macardle (London and New York: Macmillan, 1962), 33.
21. Sidney, Defence, 15–16.
22. Roland Barthes, “Literature Today,” in Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 1985), 155–56.
23. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 513, 514, 517, 519, and passim.
24. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 33.
25. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” First delivered as a lecture at Oxford in 1864, revised and reprinted in 1865 and again in 1875. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 824.
26. Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in Essays English and American, vol. 28, ed. Charles W. Eliot (1880; New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910).
27. Ibid., 65.
28. Ibid., 90.
29. Ibid., 65.
30. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). This is not only Whistler’s reply to Ruskin’s calling his work “a pot of paint flung in the public’s face” but also his explanation of why he titled the portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black. “What can or ought the public care about the identity of the portrait?”
31. Théophile Gautier, preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Joanna Richardson (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981), 35–36.
32. Ibid., 37.
33. Ibid., 39.
34. Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 17.
35. Wilde, Letters to Vincent O’Sullivan and Chris Healy. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1984, 1987), 532–33.
36. Ibid., 532.
37. Ibid., 51–52.
38. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 236.
39. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 236–37.
40. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. (New York, Norton, 2001), 1239.
41. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, 1985), 47.
42. Ibid., 49.
43. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 51–53.
44. Articles on this topic appeared in every news venue. See, for example, Jack Slater, “How Obama Does the Things He Does: A Professor of Rhetoric Cracks the Candidate’s Code.” Slate, February 14, 2008. Stephanie Holmes, “Obama: Oratory and Originality,” BBC News, November 19, 2008. “Era of Obama Rhetoric Is Over,” editorial, Washington Examiner, June 17, 2010 (online).
45. Chávez’s plan for book distribution echoes that of many U.S. cities, like “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book” or “One Book, One Chicago” programs that became popular in the 1990s and continue today.
1. Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, ed. Dorothy M. Macardle (London and New York: Macmillan, 1962), 39.
2. Ibid.
3. Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 31.
4. Alberti, Leon Battista, The Use and Abuse of Books, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1999), 17.
5. Ibid., 17–18.
6. Ibid., 18.
7. Ibid., 21.
8. The Malone Society is an extremely earnest and learned scholarly enterprise, named after the eighteenth-century editor of the first variorum edition of Shakespeare. Founded in 1906, the society publishes facsimiles of such little-known Renaissance plays as Hengist, King of Kent, and The Wisest Have Their Fools About Them. When the dance that now ends the annual academic conference was first devised, its originators saw the title as comical, an oxymoron or carnivalization, the equivalent of Shakeapeare’s “hot ice and wondrous strange snow.” The name has naturalized so much that my current graduate students see nothing unusual about it.
9. Alberti, The Use and Abuse of Books, 22.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 23.
12. Ibid., 24.
13. Ibid., 28–29.
14. Ibid., 31.
15. Ibid., 31.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 41.
18. Ibid., 42.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 44.
21. Ibid., 50.
22. Ibid., 51.
23. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 87.
24. Alberti, The Use and Abuse of Books, 53.
25. Ibid., 52.
26. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Utility and Liability of History,” in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 87.
27. Ibid., 136–37.
28. Ibid., 100.
29. Ibid., 102.
30. Ibid., 167.
31. e. e. cummings, “Poem, or Beauty Hurts, Mr. Vinal,” Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace). Cited in Norman Birkett, The Use and Abuse of Reading (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 29.
32. Birkett, The Use and Abuse of Reading, 30–31.
33. Bacon, “Of Studies,” in The Essays of Francis Bacon, ed. Clark Sutherland Northup (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 155.
34. Harold F. Brooks, The Use and Abuse of Literary Criticism: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at Birkbeck College 26th June 1974 (London: Ruddock, 1974), 3.
35. Ibid., 4.
36. Ibid., 5.
37. Ibid., 7.
38. Ibid., 8.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 9.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 10.
43. Ibid., 11.
44. Ibid., 16.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 18.
47. Ibid., 20.
48. Ibid., 21.
49. Ibid., 25.
50. Ibid., 24.
51. Ibid., 25.
52. Ibid.
53. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), ix.
54. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 452, 448–49.
55. Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Reconfiguration of Social Thought,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: 1983), 30.
56. Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), x.
57. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 65.
58. J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative,” in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 69.
59. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994), 231.
60. Ibid., 231–36.
61. Ibid., 232–33, quoting Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 212.
62. Literary critic Steven Mullaney offered in his contribution to this volume a view of the place of literary study that conveyed a sharp difference from where it might have been presumed to be in the 1970s and 1980s: “The literary is thus conceived neither as a separate and separable aesthetic realm nor as a mere product of culture—a reflection of ideas and ideologies produced elsewhere—but as one realm among many for the negotiation and production of social meaning, of historical subjects, and of the systems of power that at once enable and constrain those subjects.” Steven Mullaney, “Discursive Forums, Cultural Practices: History and Anthropology in Literary Study,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 163.
63. McDonald, The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, 1.
64. Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), xi.
1. The Great Ideas: The University of Chicago and the Ideal of Liberal Education 5, “Spreading the Gospel,” University of Chicago Library Exhibition Catalogue.
2. For this example and much more in this vein, see Dwight Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club,” The New Yorker, November 29, 1952. The Complete Greek Tragedies (University of Chicago Press) were edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore and included translations by Grene and Lattimore, as well as Robert Fitzgerald, William Arrowsmith, John Frederick Nims, and others.
3. Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club.”
4. Robert M. Hutchins, preface to The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), xxv.
5. Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club.”
6. Ibid.
7. Berlin took a saying from the Greek poet Archilochus (“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) and applied it to intellectual and cultural life, dividing writers and thinkers into hedgehogs, who view the world through a single defining idea (Plato, Lucretius, Dane, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences (Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce). Iaisah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).
8. Edward Albee, in William Flanagan, “The Art of Theater No. 4: Edward Albee,” The Paris Review 39 (Fall 1966).
9. Kenji Oshino, “Fresh Woods and Pastures New,” in “Convictions,” Slate, March 16, 2008.
10. As one critic wrote about Tristram Shandy, “themes, ideas, or systems from all sorts of places are bodily taken over and absorbed into the Sternean purposes of the work. It happens to Hamlet and Don Quixote, suggestively at first and then overwhelmingly: it happens to Rabelais, Swift, and Fielding; to the Church Fathers; and to learning so arcane that the standard edition of Tristram Shandy is overwhelmed by footnote descriptions of ‘sources.’ Such allusiveness makes fun of itself, and we are continually made aware of becoming the pedant who sees all, recognizes all, systematizes all.” J. Paul Hunter, “Response as Reformation: Tristram Shandy and the Art of Interruption,” Novel 4 (1971), 132–46.
11. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, 1934), 50.
12. William Prynne, Histriomastix (1633), f. 566; John Aubrey, Natural History and Antiquities of Surrey (1718–19), 1:190. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 3:423–24.
13. Cf. W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970); Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), etc.
14. Oxford English Dictionary: canon 2.3, “A standard of judgment or authority; a test, criterion, means of discrimination.”
1. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York and Toronto: Rinehart and Company, 1954), 15.
2. Ibid., 22.
3. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare (1807; London: Dent, 1961), 141.
4. Wertham, Seduction, 143.
5. Jan Baetens, ed., The Graphic Novel (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 8.
6. Charles McGrath, “Not Funnies,” The New York Times, July 11, 2004.
7. “All-TIME 100 Novels,” selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo, www.time.com/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html.
8. George Gene Gustines, “A Superhero in a Prism, Antiheroes in Deep Focus,” The New York Times, July 31, 2009.
9. Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 121.
10. See, for example, Mark Rose, Authors and Owners (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Thomas Docherty, Criticism and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Lee Morrissey, The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
11. Letters of Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library, ed. G. W. Wheeler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 219.
12. The Ephemera Journal 12 (April 2008).
13. “[The] notion that writing endows the oral with materiality is another facet of the collector’s interest in establishing the ephemerality of the oral, and interest that puts the oral in urgent need of rescue. In other words, the writing of oral genres always results in a residue of lost context and lost presence that literary culture … imbues with a sense of nostalgia and even regret.” Susan Stewart, “Scandals of the Ballad,” in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 104.
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 in Yale French Studies 55/56. Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (1977), 280–300.
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.
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.
24. 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.
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).
13. Hugh Grady, “Shakespeare Studies, 2005: A Situated Overview.” Shakespeare: A Journal 1 (2005), 112.
14. Ewan Fernie, “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism,” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005), 8.
15. Roger Fry, letter to Helen Anrep, August 4, 1927. In Letters of Roger Fry, ed. Denis Sutton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), 2:603.
16. Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?,” The Second Common Reader, 265. Originally published in The Yale Review, 1926.
17. Ibid., 266.
18. Ibid., 268–69.
19. Ibid., 270.
20. William Wordsworth, “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” of the 1815 edition of The Lyrical Ballads, in Paul D. Sheats, ed., Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 814.
21. Thomas de Quincey, Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts: Three Memorable Murders: The Spanish Nun (New York and London: Putnam, 1889), 5.
22. Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka and His Precursors” (1951). In Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 108.
23. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote,” trans. James E. Irby in Labyrinths, eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 39.
24. Ibid., 41–42.
25. Ibid., 42.
26. Ibid., 43.
27. Ibid., 42.
28. André Maurois, preface to Borges, Labyrinths, xii.
29. Borges, “Pierre Menard,” 44.
30. Virginia Woolf, “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” in The Common Reader, First Series (1925), ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984), 231. Originally published in the The Times Literary Supplement, April 5, 1923.
31. Ibid., 233.
32. Ibid., 240.
33. Ibid., 241.
34. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Shakespeare; or, the Poet,” “Representative Men” (1950). Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, eds. Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane (New York: Library of America, 1983), 718.
35. Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 17.
36. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 319.
37. Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in The Complete Works, 1,026; Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 312.
38. I have elsewhere discussed this scene as evidence of Shakespeare’s present and shifting modernity. See Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 272–73.
1. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), 118.
2. Errol Morris, “Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One),” as cited in Week in Review, Op-Extra, The New York Times, April 6, 2008.
3. Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, ed. Dorothy M. Macardle (London: Macmillan, 1962), 33.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 18. The truth value of “poesie” (by which Sidney means all imaginative writing, whether in verse or in prose) lay in its verisimilitude, not in its verifiability.
6. Motoko Rich and Brian Stelter, “As Another Memoir Is Faked, Trust Suffers,” The New York Times, December 31, 2008, C1.
7. Gabriel Sherman, “The Greatest Love Story Ever Sold,” The New Republic, December 25, 2008.
8. Harris Salomon, president of Atlantic Overseas Pictures, which was scheduled to produce a film based on the story Flower at the Fence. Quoted in Sherman, “Greatest Love Story.” The objects of Salomon’s attack included not only Lipstadt but also Kenneth Walzer, director of the Jewish Studies program at Michigan State University.
9. Motoko Rich, “Publisher Cancels Holocaust Memoir,” The New York Times, December 28, 2008.
10. York House Press, “Publishers’ Statement Regarding New Herman Rosenblat Book,” January 2, 2009.
11. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 29.
12. Melissa Trujillo, “Writer Admits Holocaust Book Is Not True,” Associated Press, February 29, 2008.
13. Daniel Mendelsohn, “Stolen Suffering,” Week in Review, Op-Ed, The New York Times, March 9, 2008.
14. Mimi Read, “A Refugee from Gangland,” The New York Times, February 28, 2008.
15. Anne Bernays, letter to the editor, The New York Times, March 7, 2008. Others wrote to the same effect, including Corinne Demas, the author of a memoir of her own, as well as books of fiction for children and adults. Demas, who teaches fiction writing at Wellesley College, noted that “readers will dismiss a work of fiction when the character’s story doesn’t ring true, but call that same work a memoir, and they’re gullible,” then went on to suggest that “Given the current appetite for sensational memoirs, it’s not surprising that young writers eager to be heard will eschew the tradition of fiction—where everything depends upon the power of the prose—for one where they can easily capture an audience through their titillating content.” Corinne Demas, letter to the editor, The New York Times, March 7, 2008.
16. Perhaps the most dismaying response to the James Frey scandal was the feeling on the part of many readers that, true or false, his book had given them the feel-good, “redemptive” experience they’d hoped for when they bought his “novel—er, memoir.” Mendelsohn, “Stolen Suffering.”
17. Daniel Defoe, Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (London: printed for and sold by W. Chetwood, at Cato’s-Head, in Russel-street, Covent-Garden, and T. Edling, at the Prince’s-Arms, over-against-Exeter-Change in the Strand, 1722).
18. Jill Lepore also cites the example of Robinson Crusoe in an article on history and fiction, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” The New Yorker, March 24, 2008, 79–82.
19. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, eds. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 7. Prefatory letter attributed to the Reverend William Webster. For Richardson as “editor,” see 3, 4, 6, 9, 412.
20. James W. Pennebaker, Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma and Emotional Upheaval (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Press, 2004), and Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions (New York: Guildford Press, 1997).
21. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, vol. 2, 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), 8.
22. Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, September 21, 1897, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 264.
23. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia Univresity Press, 1984), 69.
24. “Best-Seller List,” The New York Times Book Review, March 9, 2008.
25. All published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, a trade press.
26. Drake Bennett, “House of Cards.” Boston Globe, April 6, 2008, C2.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Matthew Gilbert, “Blurring in ‘Billionaires’ Is No Accident,” The Boston Globe, July 19, 2009, N1.
31. Janet Maslin, “Harvard Pals Grow Rich: Chronicling Facebook Without Face Time,” The New York Times, July 20, 2009, C4.
32. Motoko Rich, “New CUNY Center to Focus on the Art of the Biography,” The New York Times, February 23, 2008.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Plutarch, Life of Alexander, trans. John Dryden (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 3.
37. For example, the “Epistle Dedicatory” to Nicholas Harpsfield’s biography of Thomas More, in which he says that the biographer presents a “lively image” of a human being that compares favorably to the work of a sculptor or a painter, or Izaak Walton’s biography of John Donne, where he will present “the best plain Picture” of Donne’s life and, using the language of drawing, the most accurate that “my artless Pensil, guided by the hand of truth, could presnt.” Judith H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 15.
38. David Hume, “Of the Study of History,” in Essays Moral, Political, Literary (1777), ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987). Lepore, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” 81.
39. Anderson, Biographical Truth, 2.
40. Ibid., 69.
41. Ibid., 1.
42. Ibid., 69.
43. Julia Blackburn, The Three of Us: A Family Story (New York: Pantheon, 2008). “100 Notable Books of 2008,” The New York Times, December 7, 2008.
44. Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).
45. For example, chosen at random from a biography sitting on my desk at the moment, p. 340, “I intend no sacrilege …” Variety article by Azariah Rapoport, December 18, 1963, or—just below it—p. 340, “Unashamed vulgarity …” Boston Globe, February 1, 1964. Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 562.
46. Sometimes, however, the absence of footnotes leads to difficulty for the publisher or the author. See, for example, Laura Secor, “Muse of the Beltway Book,” The New York Times, June 27, 2004; Timothy Noah, “How to Curb the Plagiarism Epidemic,” Slate, January 28, 2002.
47. Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography,” originally published in the New York Herald Tribune, October 30, 1927. Reprinted in Woolf, Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 4, 230.
48. Ibid., 231.
49. Ibid., 229.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 231.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 234.
54. Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933), 82.
55. Ibid., 175.
56. Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria, 1921 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World), 125–26.
57. Correspondence of Sarah Spencer Lady Lyttelton, 1787–1870, ed. Mrs. Hugh Wyndham (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1912), 303.
58. Ibid., 354.
59. Ibid., 402.
60. Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” in Woolf, Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 4, 223.
61. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 1918 (London and New York: Penguin, 1986), 1–2.
62. Ibid.
63. Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” 4, 223.
64. Ibid., 4, 224.
65. Ibid., 4, 226.
66. John Updike, On Literary Biography (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 36.
67. N. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994), 154, 24.
68. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 175.
69. Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (New York: Knopf, 1995), 391.
70. Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend (New York: Random House, 2001).
71. David Shipman, Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (New York: Hyperion, 1993), 155.
72. Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 229.
73. Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (New York: Free Press, 1991), 272.
74. Anne Sewell, Black Beauty (London and New York: Puffin, 2008), 2.
75. Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit, 41, 58.
76. Ibid., 107.
77. From Jonathan Miles, “All the Difference,” a review of Brian Hall, Fall of Frost (New York: Viking, 2008), in The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008, 14.
78. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 80.
79. Ibid., 78.
80. Ibid., 76–77.
81. Ibid., 77. I have made a similar argument in an essay called “Bartlett’s Familiar Shakespeare,” in Marjorie Garber, Profiling Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2008), 278.
82. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” trans. Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin, 1954), 46.
83. Ibid.
84. Victor Brombert, “Pass the Madeleines,” The New York Times, November 9, 1997.
85. Michiko Kakutani, Books of the Times, The New York Times, August 9, 2002. Her remarks are prefatory to a discussion of a subsequent book by the same author, The Art of Travel.
86. Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, trans. Jeffrey Mehlmann (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2007).
87. Laura Bohannan’s “Shakespeare in the Bush,” which first appeared in Natural History in 1966, and which Bayard cites from the Internet, is a classic account, and appears in the first essay in David Scott Kastan’s edited collection of Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, published in 1995. (London: G. K. Hall; Prentice Hall International).
88. Stuart Kelly, The Book of Lost Books (New York: Random House, 2005).
1. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, eds. Linda Ferreia-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 7.
2. John McCain, presidential debate, October 15, 2008, Hofstra University; Brian Ross and Avni Patel, “Buried in Eloquence, Obama Contradictions About Pastor,” March 19, 2008, at http://abcnews.go.com; George Will, “Obama’s Eloquence Fatigue,” The Washington Post, August 3, 2008; “Dem Race: Clinton Says Obama Offers Words, Not Actions,” USA Today, February 20, 2008.
3. For one of many available analyses, see Kelly Nuxoll, “Palin’s Sentences Lack Transparency and Accountability,” The Huffington Post, October 3, 2008.
4. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157.
5. Ibid., 3.
6. In Metaphors We Live By, all of the headings are capitalized—THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, LOVE IS MAGIC—I find it somewhere between distracting signposting and baby talk and have therefore silently converted all of the capitalization to less distracting quotation marks.
7. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 245.
8. Ibid., 18.
9. George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 2002), 153.
10. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 1928, trans. Laurence Scott (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1958), and “Boris Eichenbaum,” in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 1,060.
11. Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricouer: His Life and His Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 54. Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Random House, 1996), 443–45.
12. The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. and commentary by Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 55.
13. Aristotle, Rhetoric: The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2,240.
14. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in Sheldon Sacks, ed., On Metaphor (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 29.
15. Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in Sacks, On Metaphor, 11, 15.
16. Ibid., 14, 19.
17. Ibid., 19–20.
18. Andrzej Warmniski, Readings in Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), lv.
19. Samuel Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” in Lives of the English Poets (Dutton: New York, 1968), 11, 12.
20. John Dryden, “Discourse of the Original and Progress of Satire,” in Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry (1667) (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 6.
21. Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” 12.
22. John Donne, “Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, Brother to the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford,” in John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. Albert James Smith (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 35–40; Abraham Cowley, The Mistress (1656).
23. Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” 12–13.
24. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1932, 1960), 247.
25. Ibid., 248.
26. Ibid., 250.
27. Ibid., 242–43.
28. T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality,” in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 32–33.
29. George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xi.
30. Ibid.
31. W. S. Merwin and J. Mouissaieff Masson, trans. Sanskrit Love Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), reprinted as The Peacock’s Egg (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981); Lakoff and Turner, More Than Cool Reason, 60, 70, 89, 91, 101, 102; Jerome Rothenberg, ed., Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 40.
32. Lakoff and Turner, More Than Cool Reason, 92.
33. Ibid., 90.
34. Ibid., xii.
35. Ibid., 267.
36. To underscore this idea and its importance, we might recall Nietzsche’s image of the “mobile army” discussed in chapter 7, a passage that Lakoff and Turner dispute—characterizing it as the “It’s All Metaphor Position.”
Paul de Man’s reading of this passage is indicative, since he sees it as a reminder of “the figurality of all language”:
What is being forgotten in this false literalism is precisely the rhetorical, symbolic quality of all language. The degradation of metaphor into literal meaning is not condemned because it is the forgetting of a truth but much rather because it forgets the un-truth, the lie that the metaphor was in the first place. It is a naïve belief in the proper meaning of the metaphor without awareness of the problematic nature of its factual, referential foundation.
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.
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.