Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age - Softcover

Alter, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393314995 ISBN 13: 9780393314991

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990

Synopsis

A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory tower and reestablishes reading as a personal source of complex pleasure and insight.

About this title

Synopsis:

The John Keats versus Bob Dylan debate is at its most fierce in the USA, where issues such as political correctness, the literary canon, literary theory and identity politics are hotly disputed on university campuses. This text, with a new preface by its author, deals with the conflict between the proponents of popular culture on the one hand and the defenders of high art on the other. Robert Alter argues passionately for great literature, and using examples from world literature, seeks to illuminate the key elements of literature - what distinguishes a string of words by a great writer from a list in a telephone directory - and illustrates the pleasure that can be experienced when a reader enters and explores the world that a writer has built. He offers a guide through centuries of great writing.

About the Author:

Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Bible, the magnificent capstone to a lifetime of distinguished scholarly work, has won the PEN Center Literary Award for Translation. His immense achievements in scholarship ranging from the eighteenth-century European novel to contemporary Hebrew and American literature earned Alter the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Alter is the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0393314995
• ISBN 13: 9780393314991
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264