The Use and Abuse of Literature (45 page)

1.
Andrew Dickson White,
Autobiography
(New York: Century Company, 1907), 1:364, cited in Henry W. Simon,
The Reading of Shakespeare in American Schools and Colleges
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1932), 47.

2.
John Fulton,
Memoirs of Frederick A. P. Barnard, Tenth President of Columbia College in the City of New York
(New York: Macmillan, 1896), 36. Cited in Simon, 47.

3.
Charles W. Eliot,
The Man and His Beliefs
(New York: Harper, 1926), 1:212–13. Cited in Simon,
The Reading of Shakespeare
, 48.

4.
Simon,
The Reading of Shakespeare in American Schools and Colleges
, 47.

5.
Jane Austen,
Mansfield Park
(London and New York: Penguin, 1985), 334–35.

6.
Jane Austen,
Persuasion
(London and New York: Penguin, 1985), 192, 178.

7.
U.S. Department of Education Statistics; Modern Language Association; Association of Departments of English. I am grateful to David Laurence, the director of the MLA Office of Research and ADE, for helping me to locate this information.

8.
R. P. Blackmur, “A Critic’s Job of Work,” in
Form and Value in Modern Poetry
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), 339.

9.
Ibid., 341.

10.
Ibid., 367.

11.
Ibid., 339.

12.
Ibid., 343.

13.
Ibid., 353. My emphasis.

14.
In Marjorie Garber,
Academic Instincts
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3–51.

15.
Burke never completed college, though he taught in several as a lecturer and visiting professor; Wilson, an influential editor and book reviewer, had a major hand in developing popular appreciation for several important American novelists, and in his own essays and books helped shape twentieth-century literary taste.

16.
Edmund Wilson,
The Fruits of the MLA
(New York: New York Review, 1968), 20.

17.
Modern Language Association of America,
Professional Standards and American Editions: A Response to Edmund Wilson
(New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1969), book epigraph.

18.
Wilson,
Fruits
, 35.

19.
Wilson,
Fruits
, 10.

20.
Lewis Mumford, “Emerson Behind Barbed Wire,”
The New York Review of Books
, January 18, 1968, 3–5, 23.

21.
Wilson,
Fruits
, 4, 6–7.

22.
Ibid., 7.

23.
Ibid., 8.

24.
Ibid., 13.

25.
Ibid., 20.

26.
Ibid., 38.

27.
Ibid., 8.

28.
Ibid.,17.

29.
Ibid., 19.

30.
John H. Fisher, “The MLA Editions of Major American Authors,” in
Professional Standards
, 25.

31.
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri
, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 44.

32.
Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?,”
The Second Common Reader
, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1986), 270. Originally published in
The Yale Review, 1
926.

33.
Ibid.

34.
Andrew McNeillie, introduction to
The Common Reader, First Series
, xi; Woolf,
Diary
, May 23, 1921.

35.
Samuel Johnson, “Life of Gray,” in
Lives of the English Poets
(New York: Everyman, 1968), 2:388–89.

36.
Ibid., 392.

37.
Virginia Woolf, “William Hazlitt,” in
The Second Common Reader, 1
79.

38.
Ibid., 182.

39.
Ibid., 183. The Hazlitt passage is from “On Old English Writers and Speakers,” in
The Complete Works of William Hazlitt
, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930), 2: 292–93.

40.
Virginia Woolf,
New York Herald Tribune
, September 7, 1930;
Times Literary Supplement
, September 18, 1930.

41.
William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating,” in
The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays
, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 102–13.

42.
Ibid., 104.

43.
Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
, vol. 4,
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 264.

44.
Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in
Standard Edition
, vol. 9, 143–53. Delivered as a lecture in the rooms of Hugo Heller, December 6, 107. Reported in
Die Ziet
the following day, full text published in a “newly established Berlin literary periodical” in 1908.

45.
Ibid., 152–53.

1.
George Puttenham,
The Art of English Poesy
(1589), ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 311.

2.
Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
, vol. 4,
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 525.

3.
Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” in
The Well-Wrought Urn
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947); in
The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory
, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 1,356.

4.
Ibid., 1,357.

5.
Ibid., 1365.

6.
Ibid., 1,362.

7.
Cleanth Brooks, “The Formalist Critics,”
The Kenyon Review
13, no. 1 (Winter 1951), 72.

8.
Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” 1,368.

9.
Ibid., 1,369.

10.
Ibid., 1,370.

11.
Ibid., 1,371.

12.
See Steve Ellis, “The Punctuation of ‘In a Station of the Metro,’ ” in
Paidenma
17:2–3 (Fall/Winter 1988) for a specific account.

13.
For this and other terms within “genetic criticism,” see Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Grodin, eds.,
Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

14.
Ezra Pound,
Gaudier-Brzeka
, 1916 (New York: New Directions, 1974), 89.

15.
“Beyond a native poetics, there is something Eastern behind the Western surface … Confucius complements Homer …” Kenneth Lincoln,
Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1980–1999
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 57.

16.
Rachel Blau Duplessis,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 35.

17.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Table Talk
(London: George Routledge and Sons, 1884), 63.

18.
C. S. Lewis, “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem,”
Proceedings of the British Academy
28 (Oxford University Press). Reprinted in Alvin B. Kernan,
Modern Shakespearean Criticism
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 301–11.

19.
Reuben A. Brower, “Reading in Slow Motion,” in Brower and Richard Poirier,
In Defense of Reading: A Reader’s Approach to Literary Criticism
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), 3–21.

20.
Paul de Man, “The Return to Philology,” in
The Resistance to Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 23–24.

21.
Ibid., 24.

22.
For an excellent analysis of this problem, see Jane Gallop, “The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading,”
Profession
(2007), 181–86.

23.
As George Puttenham writes in what his modern editors call “the core fantasy” of his treatise
The Art of English Poesy
, his objective in describing poetry, metrical forms, and “poetical ornament” (that is, figures of speech) was to “have appareled him to our seeming in all his gorgeous habiliments, and pulling him first from the cart to the school, and from thence to the court, and preferring him to your Majesty’s service, in that place of great honor and magnificence to give entertainment to princes, ladies of honor, gentlewomen, and gentlemen, and by his many modes of skill to serve the many humors of men …” The “Majesty” here being addressed is Queen Elizabeth, at whose court reputations—and fortunes—were indeed made and unmade, depending upon royal favor. George Puttenham,
The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition
, eds. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 1, 378.

24.
John Strype,
Memorials of the Most Reverend Father in God Thomas Cranmer
, 2 vols. (London, 1853), 1
:129
. Cited in Whigham and Reborn, 1.n.

25.
E. de Selincourt,
The Poems of Edmund Spenser
(London: Oxford University Press, 1912), xxi.

26.
Edmund Spenser, “A Letter of the Authors,” in de Selincourt,
Poems of Edmund Spenser
, 407.

27.
Jonson, “An Expostulation with Inigo Jones,” in
Ben Jonson
, vol. 8, ed. C. H. Percey and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 403.

28.
Robert Bly,
Talking All Morning
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 107–8.

29.
Larry Rohter, “Is Slam in Danger of Going Soft?,”
The New York Times
, June 3, 2009.

1.
Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us,” in
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
, ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: Norton & Company, 2000), 1,414.

2.
Virginia Woolf, “William Hazlitt,” in
The Second Common Reader
(1932), ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986), 180.

3.
Francis Meres,
Palladis Tamar, or Wits Treasury
(1598), in
The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents
, ed. Russ MacDonald (Boston: Bedford Books, 2001), 32.

4.
Susan Stewart, “Scandals of the Ballad,” in
Crimes of Writing
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 121.

5.
Ibid., 122.

6.
Jonathan Yardley, “Getting History Right,”
The Washington Post
, July 12, 2009.

7.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets
, ed. T. Ashe (London: George Bell and Sons, 1897), letter of June 15, 1827.

8.
T. S. Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” in
Selected Essays
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1932, 1950), 111.

9.
It’s worth noting “cheering up” is a phrase found at least twice in Shakespeare (2
Henry IV
4.4.13;
Macbeth
4.1.127) and is not in itself a modern idiom.

10.
T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in
Selected Essays
, 121.

11.
E. Talbot Donaldson,
Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader
(New York: Ronald Press, 1958, second edition, 1975), 1,044–45.

12.
Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, eds.,
Presentist Shakespeares
(London: Routledge, 2007). Evelyn Gajowski, ed.,
Presentism: Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare
(Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

13.
Hugh Grady, “Shakespeare Studies, 2005: A Situated Overview.”
Shakespeare: A Journal
1 (2005), 112.

14.
Ewan Fernie, “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism,”
Shakespeare Survey
58 (2005), 8.

15.
Roger Fry, letter to Helen Anrep, August 4, 1927. In
Letters of Roger Fry
, ed. Denis Sutton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), 2:603.

16.
Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?,”
The Second Common Reader
, 265. Originally published in
The Yale Review
, 1926.

17.
Ibid., 266.

18.
Ibid., 268–69.

19.
Ibid., 270.

20.
William Wordsworth, “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” of the 1815 edition of
The Lyrical Ballads
, in Paul D. Sheats, ed.,
Poetical Works of William Wordsworth
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 814.

21.
Thomas de Quincey,
Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts: Three Memorable Murders: The Spanish Nun
(New York and London: Putnam, 1889), 5.

22.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka and His Precursors” (1951). In
Other Inquisitions 1937–1952
, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 108.

23.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, the Author of
the Quixote
,” trans. James E. Irby in
Labyrinths
, eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 39.

24.
Ibid., 41–42.

25.
Ibid., 42.

26.
Ibid., 43.

27.
Ibid., 42.

28.
André Maurois, preface to Borges,
Labyrinths
, xii.

29.
Borges, “Pierre Menard,” 44.

30.
Virginia Woolf, “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” in
The Common Reader, First Series
(1925), ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984), 231. Originally published in the
The Times Literary Supplement
, April 5, 1923.

31.
Ibid., 233.

32.
Ibid., 240.

33.
Ibid., 241.

34.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Shakespeare; or, the Poet,” “Representative Men” (1950).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures
, eds. Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane (New York: Library of America, 1983), 718.

35.
Oscar Wilde, preface to
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, in
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
(New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 17.

36.
Richard Ellmann,
Oscar Wilde
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 319.

37.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in
The Complete Works, 1
,026; Ellmann,
Oscar Wilde
, 312.

38.
I have elsewhere discussed this scene as evidence of Shakespeare’s present and shifting modernity. See Marjorie Garber,
Shakespeare and Modern Culture
(New York: Pantheon, 2008), 272–73.