A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

Published by Fordham University Press 2009

A Touch More Rare

Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

Edited by: Nina Levine and David Lee Miller

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823237296

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Levine Nina :

Nina Levine is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.Miller David Lee :

David Lee Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrifiial Sons and the Father’s Witness (Cornell, 2003) and The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton, 1988).

Reviews

—Margreta de Grazia:
After a half-century of ground-breaking, earth-shaking work, Harry Berger, Jr., certainly deserves this tribute: twenty essay that celebrate, contemplate, critique, and take flight from Berger's always generative criticism.

"Very few members of any profession have bestowed a touch more rare. . . Renaissance studies has been lucky to benefit from the precedents of this master mapmaker.

—Stephen Orgel:

For more than half a century Harry Berger, Jr., has been producing
seminal work of astonishing depth and brilliance, thoroughly
interdisciplinary, massively learned, philosophically sophisticated;
but also mischievous, uninhibited, genuinely liberating. These essays
by students and friends celebrate and respond to one of the major
figures in American letters, whose work has significantly remade the
practice of cultural history. The volume is invaluable, a tribute and
guide to a protean body of work.

. . .Acknowledging the extraordinary, multidimensional work of Harry Berger Jr., and consists of a lively set of celebratory contemplations (more talks than essays) on his scholarly career.

—Stephen Greenblatt:

Somewhere in his innermost closet Harry Berger, Jr. must harbor the
secret of perennial freshness. For decades now his vitally important
work has conferred the power to see with new eyes familiar works of
literature, philosophy, and art, as if their innermost meanings were
being glimpsed for the first time. This fine connection of essays
captures the subtle flavor of Berger’s magical elixir of critical youth.

The sections on theory and academic community, in particular, raise questions about the conduct of the profession itself, and this emphasis probably makes the book most useful to those who are interested in reassessing the place of these disciplines in the university and trying to discern future directions for humanistic research.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction Nina Levine and David Lee Miller Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part One. Drama
Chapter 1. Enlisting in Harry Berger’s Imaginary Forces Leonard Barkan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
Chapter 2. Harry Berger and Self-Hatred Kenneth Gross Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
Chapter 3. Complicity and Catharsis: The Immature Criticism of Harry Berger Susanne L. Wofford Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
Chapter 4. Sack Drama Bradley Greenburg Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
Chapter 5. Redistributing Complicities in an Age of Digital Production: Michael Radford’s Film Version of The Merchant of Venice Thomas Cartelli Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
Part Two. Harry’s Bower of Bliss
Chapter 6. Acrasian Fantasies: Outsides, Insides, Upsides, Downsides in the Bower of Bliss Judith H. Anderson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
Chapter 7. Harry Berger’s Genius: Porting Pleasure in the Bower of Bliss Katherine Eggert Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	92
Chapter 8. Taking Another Peek Lauren Silberman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	104
Part Three. Critical and Cultural Theory
Chapter 9. Close Reading Transformed: The New Criticism and the World Roland Greene Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
Chapter 10. Thinking Culture, and Beyond Graham Hammill Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
Chapter 11. Bergerama: New Critical and Poststructural Theory in the Work of Harry Berger, Jr Catherine Gimelli Martin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
Part Four. Visual Arts
Chapter 12. The Power of Prodigality in the Work of Derek Walcott and Harry Berger Peter Erickson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
Chapter 13. Harry Berger’s Sprezzatura and the Poses of Cicero’s de Oratore Eleanor Leach Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	182
Chapter 14. What Art Historians Can Learn from Harry Bradford R. Collins Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Part Five. Reading Plato
Chapter 15. Platonic Irony in Berger Jay Farness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Chapter 16. Situating Harry’s Plato Jill Frank Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Part Six. Intellectual Community
Chapter 17. The Seminal and the Inimitable: An Adventure in Harryland Marshall Grossman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
Chapter 18. How Harry Taught William A. Oram Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	255
Chapter 19. Harry Berger’s Intellectual Community Jeff Dolven Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	264
The Last Word ‘‘All Your Writers Do Consent That Ipse Is He’’
Chapter 20. Backlooping: Life in a Revisionary Enclave Harry Berger Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	281
Harry Berger,Jr.: Bio-bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	333
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	349
Select Publications Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	353
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	355

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Pages
- Main content: 336
Keywords: Literary Studies; Art & Visual Culture

eBook

Published: August 25, 2009
ISBN: 9780823237296