Victor Brombert is an unrivaled interpreter of French literature; and the writers he considers in this latest book are ones with whom he has a long acqualntance. These essays--eleven of them appearing in English for the first time and some totally new--give us an acute analysis of the major figures of the nineteenth century and a splendid lesson in criticism.
Brombert shows how a text works--its structure and narrative devices, and the symbolic function of characters, episodes, words--and he highlights the distinctive postures and styles of each writer. He gives us a sense of the hidden inner text as well as the techniques writers have devised to lead their readers to the discovery of what is hidden. With wonderful subtlety he unravels the reader's participatory response, whether it be Hugo reading Shakespeare, Sartre reading Hugo, Stendhal reading Rousseau, T. S. Eliot misreading Baudelaire, or Baudelaire, Balzac, and Flaubert reading their own sensibilities. This book is a sterling example of the finest kind of literary criticism--wise, intelligent, responsive, sympathetic--that reveals central aspects of the creative process and returns the reader joyfully to the texts themselves.
The classical period in France presents a particularly lively battleground for the transition between oral-visual culture, on the one hand, and print culture on the other. The former depended on learning from sources of knowledge directly, in their presence, in a manner analogous to theatrical experience. The latter became characterized by the distance and abstraction of reading. How Do I Know Thee? explores the ways in which literature, philosophy, and psychology approach social cognition, or how we come to know others. Richard E. Goodkin describes a central opposition between what he calls “theatrical cognition” and “narrative cognition,” drawing both on scholarship on literary genre and mode, and also on the work of a number of philosophers and psychologists, in particular Descartes’s theory of cognition, Freudian psychoanalysis, mid‑twentieth‑century behaviorism, and the field of cognitive science. The result is a study that will be of interest not only to students of the classical period but also to those in the corresponding disciplines.
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