Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation - Hardcover

Arbery, Glenn C

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1882926595 ISBN 13: 9781882926596

Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2001

Synopsis

Through an examination of the work of poets and novelists who have managed to garner honor -- including Shakespeare, Homer, and Emily Dickinson -- and those whose reputations are of more recent vintage and therefore more difficult to evaluate such as Tom Wolfe, Seamus Heaney, and Toni Morrison -- Glenn Arbery explores the title question with elegant prose and subtle criticism.

About this title

About the Author

Glenn C. Arbery is Director of the Teachers Academy and Professor of Literature at The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

From the Inside Flap

In this engaging and at the same time startlingly profound book Glenn Arbery presents a new sort of criticism, both theoretical and practical, based on an assimilation of the classics so complete as to be almost visceral. Arbery s writing signals the advent of that figure for whom we have been waiting: the critic who is also a member of society, also himself a person, also emotionally involved. Those who read Dr. Arbery s book are likely not ever to regard stories, or language, or feeling or ordinary events in quite the same way again.
--Louise Cowan, author and critic, recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Charles Frankel Prize

A remarkable work of scholarship dealing with an array of poets, novelists, playwrights, and literary critics. Engagingly couched in postmodern theory, it makes an eloquent case against the discourse of power that permeates literary criticism in the early twenty-first century, favoring instead the proposition that literature is a mode of knowledge. The book is a reminder that when the best lack all conviction, great literature continues to teach wisdom.
--Ewa M. Thompson, Professor of Slavic Studies, Rice University

At a time when too much literary criticism has been reduced to fashionable jargon or dreary autobiographical posturing, Glenn C. Arbery s book shows that compelling critical work can still be produced when a critic has the courage to tackle the big questions, the honesty to confront the resulting ambiguities, and the humane intelligence to analyze them effectively. Arbery has all three qualities in abundance. His subtle and compelling study is eloquently argued, with a rich range of literary reference that engages, challenges, and above all convinces.
Martine Brownley, Goodrich C. White Professor of English Department of English, Emory University

We live in a time of unparalleled confusion about the role and importance of literary texts. Deconstructionist literary theory has undermined the notion that there is any genuine, lasting meaning to be found in poems and novels, and an increasingly politicized academy seeks to reduce such texts to the implicit ideologies they purportedly mask.

In the wake of the academic triumph of reductive theory and identity politics, the student and the lover of literature naturally ask: Does literature, as a distinct mode of the imagination, really matter? In fresh and engaging prose, experienced teacher, poet, and critic, Glenn C. Arbery, here provides a defense of literature s unique cultural and personal importance.

Most other books defending literary studies resort to polemical attacks on the ravages of theory or the devastations of campus politics, but they fail to uncover what literature actually does as a way of knowledge and source of delight. Arbery, however, attempts to enact what he describes that is, he does not theorize about literature so much as he shows us how we know through it.

Beginning with the novelists and poets now attempting to bring literary form out of the tensions of our contemporary cultural situation, this book moves toward an understanding of what makes the greatest poetry permanently relevant and praiseworthy why literature matters in giving us manners, virtue, freedom, power, as Wordsworth writes.

A culture naturally honors what it thinks serves it best, but in some situations it might not consider itself well served by what really is best. Both literary works and the reputations of their authors sometimes have a cultural utility that has little to do with literature per se or with artistic excellence. Why Literature Matters examines three authors honored in different ways by contemporary culture Tom Wolfe with the money and immediate fame of the bestseller, Seamus Heaney and Toni Morrison with the Nobel Prize. Then, turning to Shakespeare s Othello and Homer s Iliad, the book considers not only what kind of honor should still be given to permanent excellence, but also what these works themselves have to say about the question.

Through these encounters, the reader comes to see that literature matters because it lets us know our own lives, gives us words for our wordlessness, converts feeling into form, includes all the dimensions of life, interprets ordinary events for us, and gives us the high pleasure of the world become word.

Though Arbery is completely at home with contemporary literary theory, Why Literature Matters is convincing evidence that critical sophistication need not be synonymous with theoretical obfuscation or ideological browbeating. Without sacrificing subtlety or succumbing to the reactionary impulse, this book defends the irreplaceable role of literature with clarity and originality. To read this book is to live and feel the power of the literary imagination.

Edition details

• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1882926595
• ISBN 13: 9781882926596
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 255