The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [0]
Shakespeare and Modern Culture
Patronizing the Arts
Profiling Shakespeare
Shakespeare After All
A Manifesto for Literary Studies
Quotation Marks
Academic Instincts
Sex and Real Estate
Symptoms of Culture
Dog Love
Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality
Coming of Age in Shakespeare
Dream in Shakespeare
Copyright © 2011 by Marjorie Garber
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Alfred A. Knopf: Excerpts from “The Man on the Dump” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1942 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1970 by Holly Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. • Anne Bernays: Letter to the editor, printed in The New York Times, March 7, 2008. Reprinted by permission of the author. • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpt from “Burnt Norton” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. • Random House, Inc.: Excerpts from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” from Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Garber, Marjorie
The use and abuse of literature / Marjorie Garber.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37962-7
1. Literature—Philosophy. 2. Literature—Appreciation. I. Title.
PN45.G312 2011 801—dc22 2010035417
www.pantheonbooks.com
Jacket design by Brian Barth
v3.1
FOR JANE GALLOP
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Use and Abuse
2. The Pleasures of the Canon
3. What Isn’t Literature
4. What’s Love Got to Do with It?
5. So You Want to Read a Poem
6. Why Literature Is Always Contemporary
7. On Truth and Lie in a Literary Sense
8. Mixed Metaphors
9. The Impossibility of Closure
Notes
About the Author
Acknowledgments
This is a book about my lifelong engagement with literature and language, about the way I have come to think and live through literature, and about how literature thinks and lives through human beings.
The genesis of the project came in a conversation with my editor, Erroll McDonald, and my agent, Beth Vesel. To them I am enormously grateful, as always, for their commitment to the vital centrality of reading, writing, and thinking about literature and culture, and for their extraordinary faith in me.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Sol Kim Bentley, whose editorial eye and unerring sense of literary form and style was joined with a generosity of time and spirit as she read, with care, through the final text. Alexander Raymond, Sanders Bernstein, Eliza Hornig, and Daniel Wenger worked with imagination and energy to help find documents and check sources. Sara Bartel was of great assistance in helping me to balance teaching, scholarship, and administration during the time it took to assemble the materials for this book, and then to write it.
The book is dedicated to Jane Gallop, a wonderful close reader. To her I am indebted for gifts of friendship and of writing and reading that I can never adequately repay. William Germano has been, throughout the writing process, an invaluable ally and friend. Finally, I thank Joanna Lipper, who has given me a vision of the future that extends, like literature, far beyond what the eye can see.
Introduction
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the National Endowment for the Arts reported a disturbing drop in the number of Americans