Hamlet's Castle is both a theoretical and a practical examination of the interactions that take place in a literary classroom. The book traces the source of literature's power to the relationship between its illusional quality and its abstract meaning and relates these elements to the process by which a group, typically an academic class, forms a judgment about a literary work. In focusing on the importance of the exchange of ideas by readers, Gordon Mills reveals a new way of looking at literature as well as a different concept of the social function of the literary classroom and the possible application of this model to other human activities.
The three fundamental elements that constitute Mills's schema are the relationship between a reader and the illusional quality of literature, the relationship between a reader and the meaning of a text, and the concept of social experience within the environment of a text. The roles of illusion and meaning in a text are explored in detail and are associated with areas outside literature, including science and jurisprudence. There is an examination of the way in which decisions are forced by peers upon one another during discussion of a literary work-an exchange of opinion which is commonly a source of pleasure and insight, sought for its own sake. In the course of his study, Mills shows that the act of apprehending a literary structure resembles that of apprehending a social structure. From this relationship, he derives the social function of the literary classroom.
In combining a theoretical analysis with the practical objective of determining what value can be found in the study of literature by groups of people, Mills has produced a critical study of great significance. Hamlet's Castle will change concepts about the purpose of teaching literature, affect the way in which literature is taught, and become involved in the continuing discussion of the relationship of literary studies to other disciplines.
As digital communication has become dominant, commentators have declared that handwriting is a thing of the past, a relic of an earlier age. This volume of original essays makes it clear that anxiety around handwriting has existed for centuries and explores writing practices from a variety of interdisciplinary fields, including manuscript studies, Native American studies, media history, African American studies, book history, bibliography, textual studies, and archive theory.
By examining how a culturally diverse set of people grappled with handwriting in their own time and weathered shifting relationships to it, Handwriting in Early America uncovers perspectives that are multiethnic and multiracial, transatlantic and hemispheric, colonial and Indigenous, multilingual and illiterate. Essays describe a future of handwriting as envisioned by practitioners, teachers, and even government officials of this time, revealing the tension between the anxiety of loss and the need to allow for variations going forward.
Contributors include James Berkey, Blake Bronson-Bartlett, John J. Garcia, Christopher Hager, Desirée Henderson, Frank Kelderman, Michelle Levy, Lisa Maruca, Christen Mucher, Alan Niles, Seth Perlow, Carla L. Peterson, Sarah Robbins, Patricia Jane Roylance, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, and Danielle Skeehan.
For the last 2,500 years literature has been attacked, booed, and condemned, often for the wrong reasons and occasionally for very good ones. The Hatred of Literature examines the evolving idea of literature as seen through the eyes of its adversaries: philosophers, theologians, scientists, pedagogues, and even leaders of modern liberal democracies. From Plato to C. P. Snow to Nicolas Sarkozy, literature’s haters have questioned the value of literature—its truthfulness, virtue, and usefulness—and have attempted to demonstrate its harmfulness.
Literature does not start with Homer or Gilgamesh, William Marx says, but with Plato driving the poets out of the city, like God casting Adam and Eve out of Paradise. That is its genesis. From Plato the poets learned for the first time that they served not truth but merely the Muses. It is no mere coincidence that the love of wisdom (philosophia) coincided with the hatred of poetry. Literature was born of scandal, and scandal has defined it ever since.
In the long rhetorical war against literature, Marx identifies four indictments—in the name of authority, truth, morality, and society. This typology allows him to move in an associative way through the centuries. In describing the misplaced ambitions, corruptible powers, and abysmal failures of literature, anti-literary discourses make explicit what a given society came to expect from literature. In this way, anti-literature paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The only threat to literature’s continued existence, Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.
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