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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... writing to Reynolds , he is a bit blunter : " His [ Milton's ] philosophy , human and divine , may be tolerably under- stood by one not much advanced in years . " He adds : “ He did not think into the human heart as Wordsworth had done ...
... writing fiction , the act of writing fiction . ( For Wal- lace Stevens , one of Keats's later heirs , poetry is always the subject of the poem . ) Many of his finest poems are little less than hymns to the muses lightly disguised as ...
... writing the last poem in England , or in Europe for that matter , to employ Greek and Roman antiquity passionately , that is to say , soberly , without irony , sentimentality , or false notes . ( In less than one hun- dred years , we ...