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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... existence as living process : to Plato , existing things were only perishing , dim copies of the true originals ( the " paradigms ” ) which reposed in aloofness beyond them ; for Aristotle , man defines existence by means of ...
... existence and essence , of the temporal and the eternal . In so doing , it established a false hostility between all such pairings that was to discourage ( even prevent ) the growth of a Physics and a Metaphysics capable of honoring ...
... existence he has sensed , and must embody in words , though not , when all is said and done , in his words , but in those of the poem . For while it is the simple truth that poets write poems , it is also a fact that poems do get ...