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." |
From inside the book
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... Milton's thought , not something draped over it , or applied to it . In rejecting Milton's style Keats was deliberately rejecting the philosophical and religious vision that underlay and informed it , for whose embodiment that style had ...
... Milton's later style in The Miltonic Setting , is at some pains to deny the charge " so commonly brought against Milton , that of forsaking common English speech and of hardening into a remote grandeur . " " The main peculiarities or ...
... Milton's passion for scholarly completeness . " This is perfectly true . When Milton alludes to something in Ovid or in Virgil he does so with chapter- and - verse exactness . And the effect of this " habit " is obviously to limit ...