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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... tradition , as Yeats had come to view that tradition and its fate , than a great house burned down by its drunken , good - for - nothing master . To Yeats that tradition - which , like the house in the play , goes back to " Aughrim and ...
... tradition , were that tradition . To him , their systematic destruction by the Irregulars was not just the destruction of admired property ; it decreed the fall of a whole culture . Still , he knew , too , that the great houses had ...
... tradition . The careful interior structuring of the passage , the managed series of subordinations , nudged into line at the right instants by the reappearing primary sense , conform to a tradition of trained prosaic eloquence , in ...