Para/worlds: Entanglements of Art and HistoryThe essays in this book engage in a broad range of topics, stretching from Anacreon and Horace to Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and they concern themselves with the notion of Art and Life as "para-worlds," or fields of being that elucidate and complete each other, answer and imply each other, confront and contradict each other: in short, with the "entanglements of Art and History." Pearce finds centrally that there is at present a crisis in literary criticism. On the one hand, there is a bustling and exciting crop of competing critical schools, each with its special mind-set, each tending to regard itself as the final hierophantic mode. On the other, it seems clear that criticism has recently become a part of higher pathology diagnosing and (if possible) eradicating, as Giles Gunn says, "the disease called literature." The result is that scholars and critics have become more and more self-conscious and obsessive about the purpose and methods of their work. The critical approaches that Pearce himself has employed in these essays are those of no one school or dogma but are almost as varied as the texts themselves, ranging from essays in classical scholarship, through new critical close readings, to postmodernist semiotic analysis. But whether traditional or innovative in method, each of these essays aims in the first instance to be what Anatole France once said all true criticism should be: "the adventure of the soul among masterpieces." |
From inside the book
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... Thel's maiden fears , her nightmare glimpse of " the couches of the dead , " her terrified final shriek and abrupt flight , these and other elements are sufficiently strange as to give the entire poem the elusive quality of a dream , in ...
... Thel flees back into the world of Eternity . " ( Unwillingness to face the limitations of bodily exis- tence is the cause of Thel's refusal to be born . The strong Neoplatonic sound of this and the previous reading may strike a modern ...
... Thel is condemned to fall into the Ulro of Urthona . " ( Again , it is failure of nerve , weakness of character . Why she sees what she sees , and hears what she hears , why she has no inner resources to cope with what she sees and ...