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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... original . One becomes aware here of a vanishing series , or recession , of philosophic and lit- erary texts , Yeats's , More's , Plotinus ' , Plato's , Pythagoras ' , leading off like a file of diminishing ghosts into the remotest ...
... original , less powerful poet than he is ordinarily held to be , but in locating sources of his strength and his originality ; and my argument is that a main source of both is his habitual re- working of previously used poetic materials ...
... original land- scape : in the Devonshire countryside of his early childhood around Ottery St. Mary , with its sunny fields , wooded hills , vicarage full of sun and shadow , and especially its meandering river : To the River Otter Dear ...