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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... Paradise Lost merely pretentious— “ a Babylonish dialect , " formed on the “ perverse and pedantic principle of using English words with a foreign idiom " -could not conceal his delight in its rhetorical grandeur , and on the same page ...
... Paradise Lost resemble exercises in philosophic definition , theological exegesis , historical and political critique and , in short , appear as stylistic rehearsals for the performance of a poem he had not yet written . And as one ...
... Paradise Lost at any rate , and it is very much to the point to notice that this is , in fact , the way he saw it . To be somewhat more explicit , we could say that regularly throughout Paradise Lost a person , image , or event in ...