Chamber Music

A book of post-modern criticism, influenced by many modern literary critics, including Barthes and Eco, that analyses the sonnet sequences of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare from an interpretative angle as well as reevaluating the Renaissance sonnets.

Roger Kuin is a member of the Department of English, McLaughlin College, York University.

'[Chamber Music] starts with the premise that the present direction of writing about literature in literature-departments is self-defeating: on the newest critical topics we are solemnly talking only to smaller and smaller numbers of each other, about matters that no one else can be interested in, and that no social funding structure will eventually support more than marginally. Professor Kuin tries to find a way to reinoculate all of us with the humane joy of reading which makes a canonical text a liberating self-discovery, and which can begin to raise the lives of the young barbarians we are supposed to be teaching from clumping nescience to what G.B. Shaw called an enlightened levity.'

Donald Cheney, Department of English, University of Massachusetts:

'[Chamber Music] starts with the premise that the present direction of writing about literature in literature-departments is self-defeating: on the newest critical topics we are solemnly talking only to smaller and smaller numbers of each other, about matters that no one else can be interested in, and that no social funding structure will eventually support more than marginally. Professor Kuin tries to find a way to reinoculate all of us with the humane joy of reading which makes a canonical text a liberating self-discovery, and which can begin to raise the lives of the young barbarians we are supposed to be teaching from clumping nescience to what G.B. Shaw called an enlightened levity.'