You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In this lively and provocative book, cultural critic Marjorie Garber, who has written on topics as different as Shakespeare, dogs, cross-dressing, and real estate, explores the pleasures and pitfalls of the academic life. Academic Instincts discusses three of the perennial issues that have surfaced in recent debates about the humanities: the relation between "amateurs" and "professionals," the relation between one academic discipline and another, and the relation between "jargon" and "plain language." Rather than merely taking sides, the book explores the ways in which such debates are essential to intellectual life. Garber argues that the very things deplored or defended in discussions of t...
As defining as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education were to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively, Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature is to our times. Even as the decline of the reading of literature, as argued by the National Endowment for the Arts, proceeds in our culture, Garber (“One of the most powerful women in the academic world”—The New York Times) gives us a deep and engaging meditation on the usefulness and uselessness of literature in the digital age. What is literature, anyway? How has it been understood over time, and what is its relevance for us ...
Written with characteristic verve, Quotation Marks considers, among other subjects, how we depend upon the most quotable men and women in history, using great writers to bolster what we ourselves have to say. The entertaining turns and reversals of Marjorie Garber's arguments offer the rare pleasure of a true essayist.
The untold story of Shakespeare’s profound influence on Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group For the men and women of the Bloomsbury Group, Shakespeare was a constant presence and a creative benchmark. Not only the works they intended for publication—the novels, biographies, economic and political writings, stage designs and reviews—but also their diaries and correspondence, their gossip and small talk turned regularly on Shakespeare. They read his plays for pleasure in the evenings, and on sunny summer afternoons in the country. They went to the theater, discussed performances, and speculated about Shakespeare’s mind. As poet, as dramatist, as model and icon, as elusi...
The title of this collection, Profiling Shakespeare, is meant strongly in its double sense. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought by biographers from his time to our own. They also show the effects, the ephemera, the clues and cues, welcome and unwelcome, out of which Shakespeare's admirers and dedicated scholars have pieced together a vision of the playwright, whether as sage, psychologist, lover, theatrical entrepreneur, or moral authority. This collection brings together classic pieces, hard-to-find chapters, and two new essays. Here, Garber has produced a book at once serious and highly readable, ranging broadly across time periods (early modern to postmodern) and touching upon both high and popular culture. Contents: Preface 1. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers 2. Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost 3. Macbeth: The Male Medusa 4. Shakespeare as Fetish 5. Character Assassination 6. Out of Joint 7. Roman Numerals 8. Second-Best Bed 9. Shakespeare's Dogs 10. Shakespeare's Laundry List 11. Shakespeare's Faces 12. MacGuffin Shakespeare 13. Fatal Cleopatra 14. What Did Shakespeare Invent? 15. Bartlett's Familiar Shakespeare
The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts - and ghost writing. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written. Ghosts take the form of absences, erasures, even forgeries and signatures - metaphors extended to include Shakespeare himself and his haunting of us, and in particular theorists such Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - the figure of Shakespeare constantly made and remade by contemporary culture. Marjorie Garber, one of the most eminent Shakespearean theorists writing today, asks what is at stake in the imputation that "Shakespeare" did not write the plays, and shows that the plays themselves both thematize and theorize that controversy. This Routledge Classics edition contains a new preface and new chapter by the author.
“In her wide-ranging cultural history of the term [‘character’], Garber has unearthed fascinating material and is a convivial, stimulating critic.” —Michael Saler, The Times Literary Supplement Since at least Aristotle’s time, philosophers, theologians, artists, and scientists have pondered the enigma of human character. Whether defined as a moral idea, a literary persona, or a scientifically observable type, character has become omnipresent in discussions of politics, ethics, gender, morality, and the psyche. In this “magisterial book,” Marjorie Garber examines the evolution and influence of this pervasive concept. Is there a connection between “character” in the moral s...
From one of the world's premier Shakespeare scholars comes a magisterial new study whose premise is "that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare." Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as "naturally" true: ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, from James Joyce's Ulysses to George W. Bush's reading list. From the persistence of difference in Othello to the matter of character in Hamlet to the untimeliness of youth in Romeo and Juliet, Garber discusses how these ideas have been re-imagined in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news, and in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law. Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a brilliant recasting of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of the protean Shakespeare.
None
On modern culture.