The Use and Abuse of Literature (44 page)

1.
Sir Philip Sidney,
Defence of Poesie
, ed. Dorothy M. Macardle (London and New York: Macmillan, 1962), 39.

2.
Ibid.

3.
Anthony Grafton,
Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 31.

4.
Alberti, Leon Battista,
The Use and Abuse of Books
, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1999), 17.

5.
Ibid., 17–18.

6.
Ibid., 18.

7.
Ibid., 21.

8.
The Malone Society is an extremely earnest and learned scholarly enterprise, named after the eighteenth-century editor of the first variorum edition of Shakespeare. Founded in 1906, the society publishes facsimiles of such little-known Renaissance plays as
Hengist, King of Kent
, and
The Wisest Have Their Fools About Them
. When the dance that now ends the annual academic conference was first devised, its originators saw the title as comical, an oxymoron or carnivalization, the equivalent of Shakeapeare’s “hot ice and wondrous strange snow.” The name has naturalized so much that my current graduate students see nothing unusual about it.

9.
Alberti,
The Use and Abuse of Books
, 22.

10.
Ibid.

11.
Ibid., 23.

12.
Ibid., 24.

13.
Ibid., 28–29.

14.
Ibid., 31.

15.
Ibid., 31.

16.
Ibid.

17.
Ibid., 41.

18.
Ibid., 42.

19.
Ibid.

20.
Ibid., 44.

21.
Ibid., 50.

22.
Ibid., 51.

23.
Karl Marx,
Capital
, vol. 1,
The Process of Capitalist Production
, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 87.

24.
Alberti,
The Use and Abuse of Books
, 53.

25.
Ibid., 52.

26.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Utility and Liability of History,” in
Unfashionable Observations
, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 87.

27.
Ibid., 136–37.

28.
Ibid., 100.

29.
Ibid., 102.

30.
Ibid., 167.

31.
e. e. cummings, “Poem, or Beauty Hurts, Mr. Vinal,”
Collected Poems
(New York: Harcourt, Brace). Cited in Norman Birkett,
The Use and Abuse of Reading
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 29.

32.
Birkett,
The Use and Abuse of Reading
, 30–31.

33.
Bacon, “Of Studies,” in
The Essays of Francis Bacon
, ed. Clark Sutherland Northup (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 155.

34.
Harold F. Brooks,
The Use and Abuse of Literary Criticism: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at Birkbeck College 26th June 1974
(London: Ruddock, 1974), 3.

35.
Ibid., 4.

36.
Ibid., 5.

37.
Ibid., 7.

38.
Ibid., 8.

39.
Ibid.

40.
Ibid., 9.

41.
Ibid.

42.
Ibid., 10.

43.
Ibid., 11.

44.
Ibid., 16.

45.
Ibid.

46.
Ibid., 18.

47.
Ibid., 20.

48.
Ibid., 21.

49.
Ibid., 25.

50.
Ibid., 24.

51.
Ibid., 25.

52.
Ibid.

53.
Hayden White,
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), ix.

54.
Clifford Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books, 1973), 452, 448–49.

55.
Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Reconfiguration of Social Thought,” in
Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology
(New York: 1983), 30.

56.
Steven Mullaney,
The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), x.

57.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in
Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 65.

58.
J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative,” in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds.,
Critical Terms for Literary Study
, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 69.

59.
Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob,
Telling the Truth About History
(New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994), 231.

60.
Ibid., 231–36.

61.
Ibid., 232–33, quoting Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth,
Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 212.

62.
Literary critic Steven Mullaney offered in his contribution to this volume a view of the place of literary study that conveyed a sharp difference from where it might have been presumed to be in the 1970s and 1980s: “The literary is thus conceived neither as a separate and separable aesthetic realm nor as a mere product of culture—a reflection of ideas and ideologies produced elsewhere—but as one realm among many for the negotiation and production of social meaning, of historical subjects, and of the systems of power that at once enable and constrain those subjects.” Steven Mullaney, “Discursive Forums, Cultural Practices: History and Anthropology in Literary Study,” in
The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences
, ed. Terence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 163.

63.
McDonald,
The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences
, 1.

64.
Roger Kimball,
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education
(New York: Harper and Row, 1990), xi.

1.
The Great Ideas: The University of Chicago and the Ideal of Liberal Education
5, “Spreading the Gospel,” University of Chicago Library Exhibition Catalogue.

2.
For this example and much more in this vein, see Dwight Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club,”
The New Yorker
, November 29, 1952.
The Complete Greek Tragedies
(University of Chicago Press) were edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore and included translations by Grene and Lattimore, as well as Robert Fitzgerald, William Arrowsmith, John Frederick Nims, and others.

3.
Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club.”

4.
Robert M. Hutchins, preface to
The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education
(Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), xxv.

5.
Macdonald, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club.”

6.
Ibid.

7.
Berlin took a saying from the Greek poet Archilochus (“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) and applied it to intellectual and cultural life, dividing writers and thinkers into hedgehogs, who view the world through a single defining idea (Plato, Lucretius, Dane, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences (Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce). Iaisah Berlin,
The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).

8.
Edward Albee, in William Flanagan, “The Art of Theater No. 4: Edward Albee,”
The Paris Review
39 (Fall 1966).

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.”

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 called “Ulysses,”
xi–xii.

21.
Ibid., xii.

22.
Ibid., xiv.

23.
Marjorie Heins,
Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 40–41; Paul Vanderham,
James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of
Ulysses (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 32–34; Margaret Anderson,
My Thirty Years’ War
(New York: Horizon, 1969), 174–75.

24.
Mervyn Griffith-Jones, lead prosecutor, opening address to the jury, October 20, 1961. C. H. Rolph, ed.,
The Trial of Lady Chatterley
(London: Penguin, 1961), 17.

25.
Ernst, in
Ulysses
, viii.

26.
James Douglas, “A Book That Must Be Suppressed,”
Sunday Express
, August 19, 1928.

27.
Sally Cline,
Radclyffe-Hall: A Woman Called John
(Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1998), 248–49.

28.
Virginia Woolf,
The Diary of Virginia Woolf
, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 3:193, entry August 31, 1938.

29.
Woolf,
Diary
3:206–7 and n., entry November 10, 1928.

30.
Quoted in Leslie A. Taylor, “ ‘I Made Up My Mind to Get It’: The American Trial of
The Well of Loneliness
, New York City, 1928–1929,”
Journal of the History of Sexuality
10 (2): 250–86.

31.
See Charles Rembar,
The End of Obscenity
(New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 476.

32.
Justice Tom Clark, Dissenting Opinion in “A Book Named ‘John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’ v. Attorney General of Massachusetts,” 383. U.S. 416, March 21, 1966.

33.
Rembar,
The End of Obscenity
, 481.

34.
“Decency Squabble,”
Time
, March 31, 1930.

35.
See, for example, Perry L. Glantzer, “In Defense of Harry … But Not His Defenders: Beyond Censorship to Justice,”
The English Journal
93, no. 4 (March 2004), 58–63; Jennifer Russuck, “Banned Books: A Study of Censorship,”
The English Journal
86, no. 2 (February 1997), 67–70; and Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Blas, and Dawn B. Sova,
100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature
(New York: Checkmark Books, 1999), 274, 365.

36.
Robert Louis Stevenson, “Samuel Pepys,” in
Essays: English and American
, The Harvard Classics (1909–14). (New York: Collier, 1910), vol. 28.

37.
Virginia Woolf, “Montaigne,” in
The Common Reader: First Series, 1
925 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984), 58.

38.
Meyer Levin, “Life in the Secret Annex,”
The New York Times Book Review
, June 15, 1952.

39.
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in
Critical Models
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 101.

40.
Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?,”
The New Yorker
, October 6, 1997, 76, reprinted in Ozick,
Quarrel & Quandary
(New York: Vintage, 2000), 77. See also Frank Rich, “Betrayed by Broadway,”
The New York Times
, September 17, 1995; Lawrence Graver,
An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Ralph Melnick,
The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Lawrence Langer, “Anne Frank Revisited,” in
Using and Abusing the Holocaust
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Bruno Bettelheim, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,”
Harper’s
(November 1960), 45–50.

41.
Karen Spector and Stephanie Jones, “Constructing Anne Frank: Critical Literacy and the Holocaust in Eighth-Grade English,”
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
51, no. 1 (September 2007), 36–48.

42.
See, for example, Roger Rosenblatt, “Anne Frank,” in
The Time 100
, June 14, 1999. “The reason for her immortality was basically literary. She was an extraordinarily good writer, for any age.…” And “It is the cry of the Jew in the attic, but it is also the cry of the 20th century mind.”

43.
Thomas Bowdler, the English physician who produced
The Family Shakespeare
(from 1807 to 1810), though often caricatured as a repressed Victorian who dared to alter a classic, was praised by some later readers, including the poet Swinburne, as someone who had performed a service to Shakespeare by making it possible for children to read his plays.

44.
Francine Prose raises the question of whether the diary has even “been taken seriously as literature,” speculating that the failure to give Anne Frank her due as a writer may derive from the fact that the book is a diary, “or, more likely, because its author was a girl.” Prose,
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
(New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 7.

45.
T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in
Selected Essays
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1932, 1960), 248.

46.
The Cambridge History of English and American Literature
, eds. A. W. Ward, A. R. Waller, W. P. Trent, J. Erskine, S. P. Sherman, and C. Van Doren (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–21), vol. 2, section 7, part 4, 165.

47.
John Dryden, preface to
Fables Ancient and Modern
(1700), in
Selected Works of John Dryden
, ed. William Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 398.

48.
Ibid., 404–5.

49.
Ibid., 405–6.

50.
Washington Irving,
The Life of Oliver Goldsmith
(New York: John W. Lovell, 1849), 182.

51.
Ibid.

52.
James Boswell,
Life of Johnson
(London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 751–52.

53.
Henry James, “The Birthplace,” in
Selected Short Stories
(New York: Rinehart, 1955), 246.

54.
“Chatterton, the marvellous Boy / The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride.” William Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence” (43–44), in
William Wordsworth: Selected Poems
, ed. Stephen Gill (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 139.

55.
Benjamin Bailey, quoted in Walter Jackson Bate,
John Keats
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 216.

56.
W. W. Skeat,
The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton
(London: Bell and Daldy, 1871), 1: Preface, xi.

57.
Boswell,
Life of Johnson
, 579.

58.
Blair, an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, had a big influence on education in the United States. He maintained that the chief use of literature was to enable upward mobility in society and to promote morality and virtue, and his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres were often reprinted and used by universities like Yale and Harvard, where the idea of self-improvement through eloquence and literary study found a hospitable home in the nineteenth century.

59.
Stanley Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” in
Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 327.

60.
Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the
Variorum
,” in Fish,
Is There a Text in This Class?
, 167–73. Originally published in
Critical Inquiry
2, no. 3 (Spring 1976), 465–85.

61.
I. A. Richards,
Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment
(New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1929).

62.
Online syllabus of Professor Anthony Ubelhor, Department of English, University of Kentucky,
www.uky.edu
.

63.
Allan Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 374.

64.
Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 131.

65.
Ibid., 132.

66.
Ibid., 131.

67.
Peter Brooks,
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). “Freud’s Masterplot” was originally published in
Yale French Studies
55/56.
Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise
(1977), 280–300.