Para/worlds: Entanglements of Art and HistoryThe essays in this book engage in a broad range of topics, stretching from Anacreon and Horace to Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and they concern themselves with the notion of Art and Life as "para-worlds," or fields of being that elucidate and complete each other, answer and imply each other, confront and contradict each other: in short, with the "entanglements of Art and History." Pearce finds centrally that there is at present a crisis in literary criticism. On the one hand, there is a bustling and exciting crop of competing critical schools, each with its special mind-set, each tending to regard itself as the final hierophantic mode. On the other, it seems clear that criticism has recently become a part of higher pathology diagnosing and (if possible) eradicating, as Giles Gunn says, "the disease called literature." The result is that scholars and critics have become more and more self-conscious and obsessive about the purpose and methods of their work. The critical approaches that Pearce himself has employed in these essays are those of no one school or dogma but are almost as varied as the texts themselves, ranging from essays in classical scholarship, through new critical close readings, to postmodernist semiotic analysis. But whether traditional or innovative in method, each of these essays aims in the first instance to be what Anatole France once said all true criticism should be: "the adventure of the soul among masterpieces." |
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... Christian writers of the time ( e.g. , St. Cyprian ) attacking the public theaters as " Temples of Heathenism , " " Chairs of the enemies of Christ , ” and approving almost any vilification of actors and " spectaculi . " Looking back ...
... Christian " sinceritas " by applauding artificial rather than natural emotions ? Did it not subvert the whole purpose of Christianity by turning men's minds , via anthropomorphism , back to that very polytheism which Christ had come ...
... Christian theater - and being puzzled by its absence . The same church , after all , fostered a great Christian painting , a great Christian architec- ture , a great Christian music . Think of the anthems , masses , chants , hymns ...