The Use and Abuse of Literature (47 page)
Read The Use and Abuse of Literature Online
Authors: Marjorie Garber
The Impossibility of Closure
1.
Oxford English Dictionary
draft additions, March 2007.
2.
The Indexer: The Journal of the Society of Indexers
15:72/2 (1986).
OED, obelisk
, 2.b.
3.
Erwin Panofsky, “
Et in Arcadia Ego:
Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in
Meaning and the Visual Arts
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 295–320.
4.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith,
Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 3–4.
5.
Peter Brooks,
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 101–2.
6.
For example, Susan Winnett, “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure,”
Publications of the Modern Language Association 1
05, no. 3 (May 1990), 505–18, and Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” in
Alice Doesn’t
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 103–57.
7.
Roland Barthes,
Roland Barthes
, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 174–75.
8.
Thomas De Quincey,
Confessions of an Opium Eater
(London: W. Scott, 1886), 92–93.
9.
Joel J. Brattin, “Dickens and Serial Publication,” PBS, 2003,
www.pbs.org
.
10.
Frank Kermode,
The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 7.
11.
Ibid., 23–24.
12.
Edward. W. Said,
Beginnings: Intention and Method
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1975, 1985), 6.
13.
Ibid., xii.
14.
Ibid., 380.
15.
Ibid., xiii.
16.
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences,” in
Writing and Difference
, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292–93.
17.
William James,
Principles of Psychology
(New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 403–4.
18.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in
Illuminations
, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 241.
19.
Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
, 593.
20.
Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” vol. 23,
Standard Edition
, 219.
21.
Ibid., 219–20.
22.
Ibid., 236.
23.
Ibid.
24.
George Orwell,
Animal Farm
(1946) (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2003), 18.
25.
Ibid., 48.
26.
Ibid., 63.
27.
Ibid., 75.
28.
Ibid., 92.
29.
E. B. White,
Charlotte’s Web
(1952) (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 80–81.
30.
Orwell,
Animal Farm
, 97.
31.
White,
Charlotte’s Web, 1
83.
32.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in
Labyrinths: Selected Short Stories and Other Writings
, trans. James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 51, 58.
33.
André Maurois, preface to Borges,
Labyrinths
, xviii.
34.
Borges,
Labyrinths
, 249.
Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, and chair of the Program in Dramatic Arts. She has served as director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, chair of the department of Visual and Environmental Studies, and director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. A member of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies and a trustee of the English Institute, she is the former president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and a continuing member of its board. She has published fifteen books and edited seven collections of essays on topics from Shakespeare to literary and cultural theory to the arts and intellectual life.
Shakespeare After All
received the 2005 Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Newsweek
magazine chose
Shakespeare After All
as one of the five best nonfiction books of 2004, and praised it as the “indispensable introduction to an indispensable writer … Garber’s is the most exhilarating seminar room you’ll ever enter.”
Her previous book from Pantheon is
Shakespeare and Modern Culture
. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.