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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... vision . . . his philosophic vision . . . as we have it in this play . " He went to the blackboard and inscribed a character- istic suite of propositions . ( 1 ) Reverence for what is above you : ignorant and inferior fear ; superior ...
... vision of the world , or that may again . They may , in fact , be quite inaccessible to us . Or if accessible , only in extremely specialized states of lyric or mystic feeling ( whose very specialization would of course be a distortion ) ...
... vision , of the Absolute . Dante's progress through the final heaven of all loves is entrusted to Beatrice's care ; for Kafka , Frieda is the appropriate image of the soul's angel - the " anima " of the thinking man is feminine ...