The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age - Hardcover

Alter, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067162783X ISBN 13: 9780671627836

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1989

Synopsis

A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory tower and reestablishes reading as a personal source of complex pleasure and insight.

About this title

Reviews

"Peculiar things have clearly been happening in the academic study of literature," observes Alter ( Partial Magic ). A professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, he offers this slim volume as a semi-polemical corrective to the trend in recent literary studies toward theory and a resulting "distancing--in the more extreme cases, an actual estrangement--from the experience of reading literature." In his defense of reading, the author examines basic components of literature--character, perspective, style, allusion, structure--and draws on the Bible, poetry and, above all, novels to illustrate how these varied elements, "engaged in constant, shifting interplay," provide readers with pleasure in part because they resist inclusion within the grand schemes of now-popular theoretical models. With few exceptions, Alter avoids point-by-point attacks on specific critics, thereby averting, by his own example, the critical heaviness he decries in others. His enthusiasm for the works of Stendhal, Conrad, Faulkner Nabokov and Wallace Stevens, to name just a few, will indeed send readers looking for the pleasures promised.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Students read more of Lacan, Eagleton, Foucault, and Derrida, Alter protests, than they do of George Eliot or Stendhal. But despite his adversarial stance toward "fashionable absurdities," Alter wastes little time in polemics. Instead, he explains and applies those resources ready at hand to analyze a literary work. And therein lies the pleasure of reading his readings. No crabbed and repellent hieroglyphs of contemporary criticism here. Instead, there are fresh explanations of familiar terms (character, structure, allusion, perspective) and analyses that plunge boldly and incisively to the heart of the literary matter. Alter has read eveything, and he illumines each text (dozens of them, fiction and poetry--from the Bible to Lolita ) to the advantage and delight of all readers who still believe in the uniqueness and stability of great literature.
- Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067162783X
• ISBN 13: 9780671627836
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 250