The Critical Essay between Theory and Tradition

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. The Culture of Vision 1
4. Autobiographical Introduction ‘Life and Learning’ 11
5. Christopher Smart’s ‘Magnificat’: Toward a Theory of Representation 29
6. Evening Star and Evening Land 50
7. Wordsworth’s Magic Mountains 79
8. The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis 93
9. Romance And Modernity: Keat’s ‘Ode to Psyche’ 118
10. Purufucation and Danger in American Poetry 128
11. Pure Representation 145
12. The New Perseus 148
13. The Heroics of Realism 156
14. Literature High and Low: The Case of the Mystery Story 164
15. Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness 180
16. Text and Spirit 191
17. Midrash as Law and Literature 205
18. The Voice of the Shuttle 223
19. Practical Criticism 241
20. The Sacred Jungle 244
21. Radical Art and Radical Analysis 252
22. The Critical Essay between Theory and Tradition 258
23. literary Commentary as Literature 268
24. Words and Wounds 273
25. Reading, Trauma, Pedagogy 291
26. Defining Culture 303
27. The Question of Our Speech 321
28. Pastoral Vestiges 348
29. Realism and ‘America’ 350
30. The Reinvention of Hate 355
31. Jeanne Moreau’s Lumière 365
32. Spielberg’s Schindler’s List 369
33. The Interpreter’s Freud 384
34. Lacan, Derrida, and the Specular Name 399
35. Public Memory and its Discontents 415
36. Tele-Suffering and Testimony 432
37. Poetics after the Holocaust 446
38. Passion and Literary Engagement 453
39. Index 461