CRITICS' CHOICES FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESSES
Hux, Samuel & Wimsatt, Margaret & Horowitz, Irving Louis & McInerny, Ralph & Wiesenfarth, Joseph & Hazo, Samuel & Wills, Garry
BOOKS Critics' choices from the university presses Samuel Hazo For me the two most distinguished books published by university presses in 1974 were Anthony Kerrigan's translation of Miquel de...
...The central chapter gives his very elaborate map, and uses it for a long discussion (Bloom would not say explication) of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," a vehicle perfectly suited to bear these theories...
...I think it misleading to say that "the greatest poetry is closest to the common life" without emphasizing a great deal more than Rosenthal does uncommon genius and the fierce artifice that transmutes the common...
...In that sense, it is thoroughly within James' pragmatic as well as Shuetz' phenomenological tradition...
...Schoenbaum, having destroyed the legends, here preserves the stuff-his book is a great literary reliquary...
...as making a poem of considerable impact...
...Methodology does not sharpen the edge of criticism...
...Of costumes, planks, straw, powder...
...all is relation and interplay...
...And it's a far cry from that poetry most directly related to the common life: folk ballad, with its frank artifice...
...Francis-all that is left of him is fake and authentic relics...
...In this sense, Frame Analysis provides us with a thoroughly humane document without ever indulging in the conventional ideological rhetoric and meandering morality that underwrites and often typifies a good deal of so-called empirical sociology...
...But then a superior debunker went after the idolators rather than the idol, when S. Schoenbaum published his Shakespeare's Lives (Oxford, 1970...
...But for the most part it is more for the critically youthful than for the seasoned scholar...
...The book has serious limitations, most of which are duly noted by Goffman himself...
...Oxford, 1975...
...My choice for the best book of the year, and not simply that published by a university press, but the best book in social science produced last year, is Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Harvard University Press, $12.50...
...Beyond these technical issues is the presumption that one person can provide a meaningful laying on of hands of another person in such a ubiquitous world as the book industry...
...Harvard University Press, $12) -that is substantially about growing up in the Victorian novel...
...He proved, by going through dolorous examples, that one cannot write a life of Shakespeare...
...Joseph Wiesenfarth Jerome Hamilton Buckley has written a book-Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Gold-ing...
...No one reads them in order to make a monkey out of himself, but who can deny the simian character of much scholarship...
...Strong readers tie their own knots...
...David B. Burrell, C.S.C., in Exercises in Religious Understanding (University of Notre Dame Press, $8.75) suggests a contrast between method and discipline...
...Margaret Wimsalt In the field of literary criticism the most potentially influential book published in the last twelve-months is surely Harold Bloom's A Map of Misreading (Oxford University Press, $8.95...
...Bloom's Pantheon includes: Milton, Blake, Shelley, Browning, Emerson, Whitman, Stevens, among the dead, and the living poets R. P. Warren, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashberry...
...In his Introduction Professor Buckley sets out the elements of the education novel and gives an ideal definition to the genre...
...The critical essay (for that is what each chapter is) becomes narrative and reminiscent rather than expository and probing...
...This is more charming and urbane than it is critical and revelatory...
...Such books are like mirrors...
...Garry Wills The cult of Shakespeare, "bard-olatry," tried Shaw's finest elastic skills...
...It has a theoretical sobriety and a concern for generalizability only occasionally touched by previous works...
...Exercises in Religious Understanding is an important book, an exciting book, an edifying book...
...One is confronted by the existential fact that the best book by a university press may not be the best book as such...
...A poem on moral dissociation during war, for instance, compares favorably with excerpts from the Calley trial testimony, which "it would be possible to look at...
...He is more than happy to admit to the weaknesses of his data, the randomness of his samples, the outlandish use of anecdotal material without any redeeming face value, the -cticence to even mention, much less seriously deal with the function of social stratification, economic class in determining behavior, or in the organization of social life...
...In an odd way, one cannot be a Goffmanian the way one can be a Parsonian or a Marxian: one can only thank heaven for this...
...Chapter by chapter, therefore, the book has a predictable sameness...
...The Greek terms, adapted and invented, one might say, misread, would confuse Father Aristotle himself...
...Reading this book is entering another world: far from the usual analysis of the vocabularies of motives, we are provided with the motives which underlie our everyday vocabularies...
...In another sense and in another genre, Mounah A. Khouri and Hamid Algar have given us a book of poems by modern Arabic poets who (though unignorable to anyone interested in international literature) have been inexcusably ignored by the West...
...There is no reality for Goffman outside of experiencing events, or, at the most, experiencing other people who themselves either enhance or curb one's own sense of the ampleness of personal vision: expressing primary frameworks, keying events, creating fabrications and deceptions, converting the world of others into a theatrical framework, defining the rules or premises of actors and scenarios, dealing and wheeling with activities outside' the frame, anchoring activities in order to constantly distinguish the individual as a total person from the role being performed at any given moment, breaking frames, manufacturing experiences, dealing with negative experiences, the vulnerabilities of life which result from disorganization as well as organization of the world...
...The potential reader should be warned that this is wordy and difficult stuff...
...No man of words was more a dealer in action, in things-whether the second-best bed or the dog, the bear, he wrote into his plays...
...He is the great poet of stuff, and it is fitting that he survives, apart from his plays, only as a handler of stuff from his age...
...The creative contraction, the breaking-apart-of-the-vessels, restoration-restitution: these are the three stages of creation outlined by the rabbinical master Isaac Luria in the sixteenth century for purposes of Biblical exegesis, and adapted by Bloom to the reading of English literature...
...Burrell is no obscurantist, but he wears his learning lightly because he is unwilling to restrict himself to knowledge about these books or these men...
...Burrell has some things to say about this...
...Burrell, without ever saying it, shows us the needful relation between theology and the spiritual life...
...If Freud figures so lightly in this work, it has to do with Freud's irritating recourse to moralizing, and Goffman's own contrary belief in experience as something to be examined at face value, and worthy of analysis on its own terms, without assuming subterranean realities...
...Strong poets modify the tradition by overturning, adapting or substituting...
...Shakespeare, for instance, seems to have no true begetter, and no sons whatever...
...Rosenthal loves a line because it shows "how much poetry is present in the voices of people to whom it would hardly occur that this could be so"which makes sense to me as well...
...BOOKS Critics' choices from the university presses Samuel Hazo For me the two most distinguished books published by university presses in 1974 were Anthony Kerrigan's translation of Miquel de Unamuno's The Agony of Christianity (Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXXXV, $11) and An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry .(University of California Press, $12), edited, selected and translated by Mounah A. Khouri and Hamid Algar...
...Ralph McInerny The scandal of philosophy, and perhaps of theology, too, is not the multiplicity of conflicting opinions, but rather that they seem to invite us to look over the field of battle from some undefined vantage point...
...This is a book on the organization of experience, not the structure of reality...
...He is literature's St...
...The strongest reader of an established poem is the following poet who destroys the edifice in order to build it anew, differently...
...Kerrigan's Unamuno is the third of the seven projected volumes of Unamuno's Bollingen corpus, and, like its two predecessors (Our Lord Don Quixote sad The Tragic Sense of Life), it presents us with a mind ineluctably engaged with those questions that are one with man's hunger for immortality...
...Season of Youth seems to be written for the general reader-for the reader interested in how Victoria's children are being spoken about nowadays or for the reader just meeting Pip and Maggie and Ernest for the first time...
...It treats David Copperfield, Great Expectations, The Mill on the Floss, Richard Feverel, The Way of All Flesh, Jude the Obscure, Sons and Lovers, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, among other novels including Golding's Free Fall, as Bildungsromane (education novels), a literary type inaugurated by Goethe, refined by Stendahl, and first documented by Suzanne Howe in Wilhelm Meister and his English Kinsmen (1930...
...It is the quintessential Goffman book, and yet it is entirely different from any of the other seven books upon which his reputation rests...
...But I find I admire the intention somewhat more than the book itself...
...When I finished reading Burrell, I turned to George Steiner's After Babel...
...that such delimitations represent an arbitrary category designed to satisfy an advertising rubric...
...In this sense, Frame Analysis derives from a James-ian psychology much more than Freudian psychiatry...
...The Ignatian overtones of the title are not, I suspect, unintended...
...Samuel Hux One must admire the intention behind M. L. Rosenthal's Poetry and the Common Life (Oxford University Press, $6.95): the attempt to sway to love of poetry the "common reader," who, no matter how elusive, is precisely the person scholars and university presses should seek...
...Scholars with a professional interest in fiction will not find much new, say, in the discussion of the endings of Mill on the Floss or Great Expectations or Sons and Lovers or in the description of the faulty form of Feverel or the confusion of values in Jude...
...Sure they are of the stuff of life, but they ask the reader to extend himself instead of simply complimenting him on being the stuff...
...All three books lead the reader through knowledge about to a replication of the activity that texts can otherwise only report to us...
...The narrative pattern of the novel is reconstituted in the pattern of the ideal form...
...And if the practice is not entirely savory, at least the company is good...
...Is the remedy to begin ab ovo, every man his own Thales, every believer alone with God...
...criticism is reticulation, a knotty relation between this text, those that went before, and those that will follow...
...The reason to read it, for nonphilos-ophers, is its array of brilliant insights into the poetry Professor Bloom likes...
...It is as if we could best get a purchase on theology or philosophy, not by engaging in them, but by watching...
...Necessarily, this means war, on Oedipal and Freudian principles...
...Whether he is distinguishing "Chris-tianism" from "Christianity" or commenting on "life's one secret," which is "longing for more life," Unamuno always reveals that quality that makes any writer significant-he is unignor-able...
...The impermissibility of being a follower is perhaps central to Goffman's book itself because the constant questioning of motives and vocabularies prevents intellectual ossification or slavish ideological emulation of a leader...
...One advantage I do have is that being the recipient, as editor-in-chief of transaction/SOCIETY, of just about every major book published by university presses in social science, I feel more comfortable than with the larger problems one has to face in making a selection...
...The nub of the pressure for relevance is protection against pedantry...
...For the sake of a triad, let me add Julian Marias' Philosophy as Dramatic Theory...
...Now that these translations are available, much of the ignorance can be dissipated...
...Small wonder that we then succumb to the doomed hope that some general method, some characteristica generalis, can be brought to the fray and resolve all conflicts...
...Most of the poems he discusses resist his method...
...So we have no other way to learn from thinkers like these except to learn how to do what they did so well...
...Our wish was to become wise and we end up only knowledgeable...
...It is very moving to stand in the Folger Library and see his half to a deed of land...
...The Anxiety of Influence mapped the terrain in 1973...
...The primary value of the book lies in this attempt to define the genre...
...The great fortress of Assisi, built against the saint's injunctions, was needed to preserve the saint's bones from aggressive cultists...
...The novel is not discussed, nor other critics, nor the Augustans, not anything that might be described as belles-lettres...
...But whatever its derivations, the book as it stands is an unusual and thoroughly outstanding contribution to the theory and practice of social science...
...Autobiographical facts are disentangled from the fictional presentation of the semiautobiographical hero, areas of conflict between generations are distinguished, the hero's migration from country to city described, his two love affairs discussed, and the problematic endings of the novels evaluated...
...And why learn about someone unless we can learn from him...
...As a result, and in an odd way, he makes us less vulnerable...
...In this immense work of nearly 600 pages, never once are we bludgeoned into accepting a weightless systemic scaffold...
...Not that Rosenthal ignores that a poem is a thing made and worthy of active wonder- some of his readings are beautifully appreciative of rhythm and image-but his emphasis is steadily on the test of familiarity, often of the most naturalistic sort...
...and finally, there are limitations of the bestower of symbolic rewards...
...I know of no single work, outside of Freud's Dream Analysis, that provides so rich a storehouse of the self as a private atom in the world of public interactions...
...The book's greater originality lies in its description of a genre and in its assimilation of more recent novels to it...
...Irving Louis Horowitz Selecting the best book in social science published by a university press, is even more hazardous than defining the mission of a university press, and perhaps equally impossible of success...
...How can we turn again to Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and Kierkegaard, get a feel for what they are doing and begin in our own way to do the same sort of thing...
...50...
...Burrel's reading of the opening questions of the Summa theologiae interprets the text, to be sure, but, in a way that few exegetes have, he involves us in the process and thus lays upon us a heavier responsibility than that entailed by having an opinion...
...more importantly he shows how it can be done...
...when a monkey looks in, no apostle looks out...
...But Shakespeare is not history's Jesus...
...this sequel sets out to be more specific, bearing to its predecessor a relation not unlike that of I. A. Richards' famous pair: Principles of Criticism and Practical Criticism...
...This method of proceeding tends more toward synopsis than analysis...
...Professor Bloom has been constructing this chart for a number of years, with studies of the Romantic poets, Blake, Yeats...
...A poem is a text floating in a vacuum...
...Shakespeare was a handler of properties, stage and "real...
...Goffman compels the reader to become incredibly involved, not only in finding out what he has to say, but locating ourselves within the frames of analysis and the strips of activity Goffman talks about...
...finally, a universe of transforming experience so that one's life presumably becomes more meaningful...
...Our most popular "serious poetry" of the moment, Erica Jong's for instance, depends for its success on providing us with self- (ours and hers) aggrandizing images of the ordinary...
...We are in a world far different from that of T. S. Eliot, with comfortable tradition being handed on and gently altered, and far, too, from Northrop Frye's tidy cosmos...
...So what is he doing here (William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life...
...The reader is reacquainted with old friends by talk about their familiar lives from an altered perspective...
...Lichtenberg's aphorism certainly applies to the Confessions, to the Proslogion, to the Summa and to Sickness Unto Death...
...In filtering social events through the written word of sociologists, this volume of Erving Goffman must be ranked a landmark achievement...
...These books leave out a large part of the English curriculum...
...Not that Goffman gives us anything so preposterously pretentious as a new theology, rather he provides us with a new sensibility, a public display of the sorts of private informations all of us have, but rarely are willing to part with...
...And the two books, between them, define the cult and retrieve the saint...
...Yet, when all is said and done, decisions are made to read, buy, comment and judge books...
...To read his introductory essay cum apologia pro vita sua is to have all thunder stolen from any possible line of criticism...
...But to build the case for our need of poetry on how much like us it is instead of asking us to move outside ourselves toward something else is a kind of pandering to passivity...
...They restore our wonder and we are reminded that theoria is the most intense activity...
...The view of poetry this book assumes doesn't really need an apologist...
...No one novel represents all the elements but each has some of them...
...For a sample of the contents, here is Albert Adib's "Fidelity"-"I never loved you/But loved myself in you/The reflections of a dream, a vision/And I know that in your mind/I was only the revenge/ For some wasted love/We lived together/And from us was composed a lying legend/That stifled our souls in pain/While the world thought us some eternal song/O the contempt of love/You were not mine, I was not yours/I shall leave you, you will leave/ Two strangers that lived together/ Leaving behind them/ Lies...
...As his poets are hyperbolic, so is he, standing on the seashore he considers the true American locus, mingling passion with learning, urging us, in spite of surging decay, to endure.g us, in spite of surging decay, to endure...
...He makes the painful vulnerabilities of private lives a matter of public discourse...
...Having read all of Goffman's other work, one thing I can say without hesitation: Frame Analysis is a theoretical summing up of all that has transpired in his literary world...
...It proceeds by examining the way the constituent elements of the ideal form appear one way or another in each of the novels mentioned above...
...Goffman offers not simply a way of looking at the experiential world, but a way of living through that world as experienced...
...this act Bloom calls "misprision...
...Included in this anthology are Gibran, the distinguished Iraqi Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, the Damascene Ali Ahmed Said (who writes under the name of Adonis-see my The Blood of Adonis from the University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), the superb Palestinians Fadwa Tugan and Mahmud Darwish as well as thirty others from the Arab world...
...It is as if Albert Schweitzer, having shown that the historical Jesus will be run down by no quest, wrote The History of Jesus...
...It is a universe not only described, but boldly created by its author...
Vol. 102 • May 1975 • No. 5
