The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [152]
9. Kenji Oshino, “Fresh Woods and Pastures New,” in “Convictions,” Slate, March 16, 2008.
10. As one critic wrote about Tristram Shandy, “themes, ideas, or systems from all sorts of places are bodily taken over and absorbed into the Sternean purposes of the work. It happens to Hamlet and Don Quixote, suggestively at first and then overwhelmingly: it happens to Rabelais, Swift, and Fielding; to the Church Fathers; and to learning so arcane that the standard edition of Tristram Shandy is overwhelmed by footnote descriptions of ‘sources.’ Such allusiveness makes fun of itself, and we are continually made aware of becoming the pedant who sees all, recognizes all, systematizes all.” J. Paul Hunter, “Response as Reformation: Tristram Shandy and the Art of Interruption,” Novel 4 (1971), 132–46.
11. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, 1934), 50.
12. William Prynne, Histriomastix (1633), f. 566; John Aubrey, Natural History and Antiquities of Surrey (1718–19), 1:190. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 3:423–24.
13. Cf. W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970); Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), etc.
14. Oxford English Dictionary: canon 2.3, “A standard of judgment or authority; a test, criterion, means of discrimination.”
THREE What Isn’t Literature
1. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York and Toronto: Rinehart and Company, 1954), 15.
2. Ibid., 22.
3. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare (1807; London: Dent, 1961), 141.
4. Wertham, Seduction, 143.
5. Jan Baetens, ed., The Graphic Novel (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 8.
6. Charles McGrath, “Not Funnies,” The New York Times, July 11, 2004.
7. “All-TIME 100 Novels,” selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo, www.time.com/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html.
8. George Gene Gustines, “A Superhero in a Prism, Antiheroes in Deep Focus,” The New York Times, July 31, 2009.
9. Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 121.
10. See, for example, Mark Rose, Authors and Owners (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Thomas Docherty, Criticism and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Lee Morrissey, The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
11. Letters of Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library, ed. G. W. Wheeler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 219.
12. The Ephemera Journal 12 (April 2008).
13. “[The] notion that writing endows the oral with materiality is another facet of the collector’s interest in establishing the ephemerality of the oral, and interest that puts the oral in urgent need of rescue. In other words, the writing of oral genres always results in a residue of lost context and lost presence that literary culture … imbues with a sense of nostalgia and even regret.” Susan Stewart, “Scandals of the Ballad,” in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 104.
14. “Sibyl with Guitar,” Time, November 23, 1962. Cited in John Burgess, “Francis James Child,” Harvard magazine, May–June 2006, 52.
15. Stewart, “Scandals of the Ballad,” in Crimes of Writing, 102–3.
16. Ernst, in United States v. One Book called “Ulysses,” 5 F. Supp. 182 (Southern District of New York, 1933). In James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946), xi.
17. Ibid., xii.
18. Ibid., xiii–xix.
19. Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge (New York: Knopf, 1994), 338.
20. United States v. One Book