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does not seek answers or closure. A multiplicity of persuasive and well-argued “meanings” does not mean the death or loss of meaning, but rather the living presence of the literary work in culture, society, and the individual creative imagination. To say that closure is impossible is to acknowledge the richness and fecundity of both the reading and the writing process.

The use of literature begins here.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Study of Literary Reading in America (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, June 2004), www.arts.gov; “Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline, According to National Endowment of the Arts Survey,” National Endowment for the Arts, July 8, 2004, www.arts.gov.

2. Reading at Risk, ix–xii.

3. Ibid., 18.

4. Ibid., 2.

5. Ibid., vii.

6. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives of the Poets (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1880), 38.

7. Maria Edgeworth, Moral Tales for Young People (London: Routledge, 1863), 179.

8. Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (New York: C. S. Francis & Co., 1845), 16–17.

9. Oliver Goldsmith, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (London: Dodsley, 1759).

10. Thomas A. Trollope, What I Remember (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889), 3:131.

11. Harris Interactive Poll #37, conducted online within the United States between March 11 and March 18, 2008. 2,513 adults, aged eighteen and over, responded. Results released April 7, 2008.

12. “A letter, a litter. Une lettre, une ordure. On a équivocé dans le cénacle de Joyce sur l’homophonie de ces mots en anglais.” Jaques Lacan, “Le Seminaire sur ‘La lettre volée,’ ” Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 25. The actual reference in Joyce is slightly different from Lacan’s recollection: “The letter! The litter!” (Finnegans Wake 93, 123) and “type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward” (FW 615).

13. Emily Dickinson, letter to Colonel T. W. Higgonson, August 1870, in Martha Bianchi, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1924), 276.

14. A. E. Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry” (1933), in The Name and Nature of Poetry and Other Selected Prose (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1961), 193.

15. John Keats, letter to J. H. Reynolds, February 3, 1818, in Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 86–87.

16. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” published in Longman’s Magazine 4 (September 1884) and reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888).

17. Matthew Arnold and Thomas Arnold, Their Influence on English Education (New York: Scribner, 1898), 104.

18. Adam Phillips, preface to Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvii.

19. Ibid., 366.

20. Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, ed. Dorothy M. Macardle (London and New York: Macmillan, 1962), 33.

21. Sidney, Defence, 15–16.

22. Roland Barthes, “Literature Today,” in Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 1985), 155–56.

23. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 513, 514, 517, 519, and passim.

24. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 33.

25. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” First delivered as a lecture at Oxford in 1864, revised and reprinted in 1865 and again in 1875. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 824.

26. Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in Essays English and American, vol. 28, ed. Charles W. Eliot (1880; New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910).

27. Ibid., 65.

28. Ibid., 90.

29. Ibid., 65.

30. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). This is not only Whistler’s reply to Ruskin’s calling his work “a pot of paint