Dialogues With/and Great Books: The Dynamics of Canon Formation

ISBN-10: 1845195183
ISBN-13: 9781845195182
Category: Literary Criticism
Language: English
Published: 2022-08-12
Author: David Fishelov

Description

What is the source of a book's perceived greatness and why do certain books become part of the accepted canon? Dialogues with/and Great Books - now available in paperback - presents a fresh perspective on these questions, re-visiting prevalent approaches that explain a work's reputation in terms of its aesthetic qualities ("the beauty view") or as the result of dictates by social hegemonies ("the power view"). Author David Fishelov argues that the number and variety of echoes and dialogues a book generates - with readers, authors, translators, adaptors, artists, and critics - is the most important source of its perceived greatness. The first part of the book - What Is a Dialogue? What Is a Great Book - provides useful distinctions between different kinds of dialogue (genuine dialogue, dialogue-of-the-deaf, and echo-dialogue), develops theoretical arguments (why the dialogic approach is not circular), and empirically tests intriguing cases (why has Candide, and not Rasselas won the literary race for fame?). The second section - Genuine Dialogues with Great Books - presents in-depth readings of literary and artistic dialogues with well established canonical works, including Monty Python's The Life of Brian, Swift's distortion of More's Utopia, and some modern adaptations of Ovid's Pygmalion, providing an opportunity to examine the process by which dialogues contribute to a work's reputation. Through its special blend of theoretical arguments, empirical methods, and sensitive interpretations, Dialogues with/and Great Books offers a stimulating invitation to re-think the literary canon and intertextuality - and the intricate connections between the two.

Get the book

Similar books

Virginia Woolf and the Great War
By Karen L. Levenback
I owe special thanks to Bruce Martin and Evelyn Timberlake ( at the Library of Congress ) ; Philip Milato and Steve Crook ( at the Berg Collection ) ...
In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship
By Karen Bojar
... Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” 157 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 38 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 21 Wilson, Emily (trans.
Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts
By William M. Clements
HENRY TIMBERLAKE'S CHEROKEE WAR SONG 1. That Timberlake's memoir contains the first English translation of the words of a Native American song seems to have ...
Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature
By William H Bridges
“Justin Timberlake, 'The 20/20 Experience': Is There a Visual Preference for Whiteness?” Interview with Marc Lamont Hill. HuffPost Live, 27 March 2013.
Shakespeare's Edward III
By William Shakespeare
Thompson , E . in Pollard 1923 . Thompson , J . Shakespeare and the Classics , 1952 . Tillyard , E . Shakespeare ' s History Plays , 1944 . Timberlake , P ...
The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents
By Laura Frost
In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic ...
The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World
By Laura White
Similarly, he deplored the picturestories of A. B. Frost in his Stuff and Nonsense ... When he'd eaten eighteen, He turned perfectly green, Upon which he ...
Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century
By Laura Brown
Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for the course, ... William Frost (1953; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ...
Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century
By Laura Olcelli
D'Albertis, Luigi. New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. First published 1880.
A Concordance to Conrad's The Arrow of Gold
By Paul L. Gaston, Todd K. Bender
... i ge 3 let S deal ing ge a lings ge at t Joe a f J & at n ce at h-ced ge at hly ue to 3 sec ge is a te debit de cap it a t e u ge c e it ful ge c e i ve ...