Touch More Rare

Touch More Rare

Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

  • Auteur: Levine, Nina; Miller, David Lee
  • Éditeur: Fordham University Press
  • ISBN: 9780823230303
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780823237296
  • eISBN Epub: 9780823230327
  • Lieu de publication:  New York , United States
  • Année de publication: 2009
  • Année de publication électronique: 2009
  • Mois : Août
  • Langue: Anglais

Harry Berger, Jr., has long been one of our most revered and respected literary and cultural critics. Since the late nineties, a stream of remarkable and innovative publications have shown how very broad his interests are, moving from Shakespeare to baroque painting, to Plato, to theories of early culture.

In this volume a distinguished group of scholars gathers to celebrate the work of Harry Berger, Jr. To "celebrate," in Berger's words, is "to visit something either in great numbers or else frequently-to go away and come back, go away and come back, go away and come back. Celebrating is what you do the second or third time around, but not the first. To celebrate is to revisit. To revisit is to revise. Celebration is the eureka of revision." Not only former students but distinguished colleagues and scholars come together in these pages to discover Berger's eurekas-to revisit the rigor and originality of his criticism, and occasionally to revise its conclusions, all through the joy of strenuous engagement.

Nineteen essays on Berger's Shakespeare, his Spenser, his Plato, and his Rembrandt, on his theories of interpretation and cultural change and on the ethos of his critical and pedagogical styles, open new approaches to the astonishing ongoing body of work authored by Berger.

An introduction by the editors and an afterword by Berger himself place this festival of interpretation in the context of Berger's intellectual development and the reception of his work from the mid-twentieth century into the first decade of the twenty-first.

  • Contents
  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Part One: DRAMA
    • 1. Enlisting in Harry Berger’s Imaginary Forces
    • 2. Harry Berger and Self-Hatred
    • 3. Complicity and Catharsis: The Immature Criticism of Harry Berger
    • 4. Sack Drama
    • 5. Redistributing Complicities in an Age of Digital Production: Michael Radford’s Film Version of The Merchant of Venice
  • Part Two: HARRY’S BOWER OF BLISS
    • 6. Acrasian Fantasies: Outsides, Insides, Upsides, Downsides in the Bower of Bliss
    • 7. Harry Berger’s Genius: Porting Pleasure in the Bower of Bliss
    • 8. Taking Another Peek
  • Part Three: CRITICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY
    • 9. Close Reading Transformed: The New Criticism and the World
    • 10. Thinking Culture, and Beyond
    • 11. Bergerama: New Critical and Poststructural Theory in the Work of Harry Berger, Jr.
  • Part Four: VISUAL ARTS
    • 12. The Power of Prodigality in the Work of Derek Walcott and Harry Berger
    • 13. Harry Berger’s Sprezzatura and the Poses of Cicero’s de Oratore
    • 14. What Art Historians Can Learn from Harry
  • Part Five: READING PLATO
    • 15. Platonic Irony in Berger
    • 16. Situating Harry’s Plato
  • Part Six: INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITY
    • 17. The Seminal and the Inimitable: An Adventure in Harryland
    • 18. How Harry Taught
    • 19. Harry Berger’s Intellectual Community
  • THE LAST WORD: "ALL YOUR WRITERS DO CONSENT THAT IPSE IS HE"
    • 20. Backlooping: Life in a Revisionary Enclave
  • Notes
  • Bio-bibliography
  • List of Contributors
  • Select Publications Index
  • General Index
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • J
    • K
    • L
    • M
    • N
    • O
    • P
    • R
    • S
    • T
    • V
    • W
  • Photo Album

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